Thoughts on Reading Lonesome Dove

I was looking for something new to read, some fiction to dig into, so I thought I would give Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove a go. It's one of those books that is touted as a Great American Novel, but more than that, I figured it might be entertaining. Decades ago, we saw the "mini-series" starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones as Gus and Captain Call and it certainly was. In fact, I pictured them in my mind as I read. And that's not a bad thing. If I hadn't seen that, I still would have needed to conjure up an image for each of them. For this is what happens when we read, right? You can't read about a character without picturing something. The difference is that the figures we conjure on our own are more vague. There's a loose form with human attributes. Vague yet still specific to the character.

About the time I started reading, I noticed at a site I go to that they were considering Lonesome Dove as a book club selection. But, you know what, I don't think I would have enjoyed that really. When I read I don't do so looking for metaphors or foreshadowing or whatever the other teacherly ways of engaging with a text are. What I read fiction for is for my mind to be fully engaged in an interesting way. On a fundamental level, that's all there is to it. Because here's the thing. Unless you are in sitting Vipassana or Zen meditation, your mind is going to be working away -- at something. Arguably, it would be better if I were using my mind in those moments, those hours, writing my own Macbeth, or at the very least bettering myself. But I'm not built that way. I do devote time for writing nearly every day, but nobody writes all the time. It's hard! Anyway, I know that Macbeth isn't so much the imagined alternative to time spent reading as surfing the internet relentlessly is, replete with all its informational noise. Now, it's not like I'm reading all the time. It's both engaging and relaxing for me to watch sports as well as to watch mysteries and thrillers on Netflix. (Confession: I watch a lot of golf. It's like natural morphine to me.)

So: Lonesome Dove. It definitely served well for occupying my mind for many, many weeks. Perfect! I don't know what its literary virtues are per se (it did win a Pulitzer Prize), but it's an epic, and what they call a ripping good yarn. Set in the post-Civil War years, it's the story of two former Texas Rangers and their various sidekicks/employees who get bored with their horse selling business in deep southern Texas and lead a cattle drive to Montana. It takes a while for the action to start, but I didn't mind at all, because McMurtry is genius at dialogue and rendering vivid characters, skills he employs to draw you in for the first 100 pages or so. And it's funny in a wry sort of way, thanks mostly to the relentless musings of the garrulous Gus. Basically, I can't read a novel, or watch a show for that matter, unless the dialogue is good. For me, it's dialogue more than anything establishes the tone of a book, as well as its verisimilitude, and these are the things that make you want to spend time with a story. 

So, what McMurtry does is create a world for you to enter into. And it's a stark one. Southern Texas is very, very hot and very, very flat. And dusty. As they make the cattle drive north through Texas, they encounter at least one massive dust storm. Then, when they hit the plains, it's not much better. There is a massive hail storm somewhere in Nebraska. And here's one takeaway: The men living this life, and the women who joined them in this unglamorous frontier existence could put up with a lot more pain and discomfort than I ever could, or as all the people back East could either. Here I am, a product of civilization, and what that really means is . . . I'm soft. Well, we all are compared to our ancestors, but it was especially rough out on the frontier. They had a different relationship to death, as it was fairly ubiquitous, at least how McMurtry tells it. Unsentimental. And, at least during the cattle drive, knowing it could come any time. And in fact, a few of them do die. If they hadn't quite developed an attitude of "it's a good day to die," well, they did see each day as a day when they might die. This not to say there is no grieving. The character Clara, who lives with her family on the Nebraska plain, lost three boys to disease, it it haunts and pains her without end.

A few other things. In this "man's world," a lot of them are totally ignorant of women and the way they are. This was interesting. Out there in the deserts and the plains, a guy could go through life never even dreaming of getting married, much less having a "girlfriend." A lot of McMurtry's guys are pretty uncool. He wanted to write an "anti-Western" and this is certainly one way he does that. I guess in the traditional Westerns the cowboys are usually pretty cool, unless they are the bad guys, which means they are depraved and debauched. In this man's world, the role of prostitutes is central. Or, whores as they are called -- in a nonjudgmental way. What is there to judge? Not to go too caveman here but men do indeed have "needs." Do the whores have hearts of gold? No. They're just working ladies, though they might have arrived at this station through hardship. One prostitute, Lorena, is at the heart of the story. She's pretty well drawn. I guess the upshot is, in McMurtry's frontier, there's not a lot of room for moralizing. 

And what about the "Indians"? The way McMurtry presents it, on the part of the rangers and cowboys, there is no animosity per se. In fact, they respect them more than most of the horse thieves they have to track down. Often, they are seen as worthy adversaries, and the more skilled and ruthless among them, in this book the Comanches, are feared even as they are respected. At the point in US history portrayed in the book, some Native tribes have settled into normalized relations with the Europeans, with trading and mutual aid part of the course of things, something Lonesome Dove presents alongside the bloody confrontations. Just an aside: It seems to me that in large part the Indians saw the Europeans as just another adversary. They were used to having adversaries, as the pre-Columbian world was filled with constant conflict among tribes. In other words, the Europeans weren't considered inordinately "evil," though it was certainly recognized that the endless waves of Europeans signified the end of a way of life, and many nobly fought to the end to try to preserve it.

So, I guess I didn't really read Lonesome Dove for what it displayed in terms of literary value. I read it to spend time with these characters, to root for them, or at least to care for them, as they made their way through this portion of life, this way of life. The literary achievement is that the book enables you to do this. And it does it by deploying skilled rather than clunky prose, by over and over again presenting conversations that ring true, and by often enough presenting passages that are lyrical and musical enough to let you know that it's a great book you are reading, and not a show that you are watching.