Lonesome Dove: A Novel

Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove starts with pigs and ends with sorrow. In between lies one of the best books I’ve ever read.The novel is set in the American West after the Civil War. The protagonists, Woodrow Call and Augustus “Gus” McCrae, are former Texas Rangers who retired a decade ago and spent the intervening years in the little Texas town of Lonesome Dove. Nominally, they run the Hat Creek Cattle Company with a few of their old comrades (and two blue pigs, who kick off the book by eating a snake). But mostly they’re just whiling away the hours.This part of the story is easy, pleasurable reading. McMurtry writes in third-person omniscient, meandering from one character to the next and bringing them to life quickly and completely. Call is a workaholic prone to brooding. (“Give Call a grievance,” we hear early on, “however silly, and he would save it like money.”) Gus is voluble and lazy. Pea Eye is simple but solid. Deets is as reliable as he is quirky (he makes his pants out of quilts). Newt is young and desperate to please.Even minor characters get distinctive traits. Lippy “was so named because his lower lip was about the size of the flap on a saddlebag. He could tuck enough snuff under it to last a normal person at least a month; in general the lip lived a life of its own, there toward the bottom of his face. Even when he was just sitting quietly, studying his cards, the lip waved and wiggled as if it had a breeze blowing across it.” And Joe “had a habit of staring straight ahead. Though Call assumed he had a neck joint like other men, he had never seen him use it.”For a while, it seems like the Hat Creek crew might putter around Lonesome Dove forever. Then Jake, another ex-ranger—on the run from the law, as it happens—rides into town and mentions that he’s been to Montana and seen vast tracts of good, unsettled land there. This lights a fire under Call. He spurs the boys into motion, leading them on cattle raids across the Mexican border and hiring extra hands to help drive the animals north. So begins a great, three-thousand-mile trek from some of the lowest latitudes of the country to the highest.Things get hairy almost immediately. Death comes fast on the drive, and the dangers are too varied to guard against: snake-plagued river crossings, lightning storms on the open plains, searing droughts, and worse. Likable characters are abused and killed. Some of your favorites won’t make it. Prepare to be heartbroken.Yet there’s no grand goal here. Call and Gus aren’t trying to open up the American West—they already served their time protecting settlers along the shifting frontier. Montana is a vague destination, not a mission; Call essentially leaves Lonesome Dove on a whim. Gus goes along for lack of anything better to do, but not eagerly. “Here you’ve brought these cattle all this way,” he complains to his partner around the halfway mark, “with all this inconvenience to me and everybody else, and you don’t have no reason in this world to be doing it.”McMurtry has plenty of reasons for the drive, though. In his preface to the 25th-anniversary edition of Lonesome Dove, he argues that “the central theme of the novel is not the stocking of Montana but unacknowledged paternity,” namely Newt’s. His mother is long dead, and his father might be one of the Rangers.But that wasn’t the thread that stood out most to me. The book is filled with restless souls regretting all sorts of errors. Gus wishes he’d married his sweetheart when he had the chance. “I expect it was the major mistake of my life, letting her slip by,” he tells Call. For his part, the quieter man laments getting involved with women at all. Jake can’t believe he’s committed hanging crimes. July Johnson, the Kansas sheriff pursuing Jake, hates himself for leaving three of his charges to face a murderer. And so on.Aging is the through-line here—aging and change. Gus and Call are past their primes. They were legendary Rangers once, but now they’re fading into irrelevancy. The younger generation doesn’t hold them in the same esteem. “I guess they forgot us, like they forgot the Alamo,” August observes after the owner of a bar tries to kick him out for demanding respectful treatment. “Why wouldn’t they?” Call answers. “We ain’t been around.”The West is moving on too. The buffalo are nearly done, pushed to the brink of extinction by wasteful hunting. Gus rides past several slaughter sites where it looks like “a whole herd had been wiped out, for a road of bones stretched far across the plain.” The Native Americans aren’t in much better shape—despite their fearsome reputation, their numbers have dwindled in tandem with the buffalos’. “With those millions of animals gone,” Gus reflects, “and the Indians mostly gone in their wake, the great plains were truly empty, unpeopled and ungrazed. Soon the whites would come, of course, but what he was seeing was a moment between, not the plains as they had been, or as they would be, but a moment of true emptiness, with thousands of miles of grass resting unused, occupied only by remnants—of the buffalo, the Indians, the hunters.”This is all tragic, but it’s beautifully done.A couple things bothered me, however. That 25th-anniversary preface contains what feel like major spoilers. They aren’t, but I’d still skip this section until you’re done with the story proper. (Unless you want to start the book as grumpy as I did.)More significantly, while Deets shines as the only African American in the Hat Creek outfit (“He’s the best man we got,” Call says late in the drive; “Best man we’ve ever had,” Augustus agrees), the one Native American that gets extended time on the page is a vicious monster. We meet some friendlier indigenous people in passing, but I kept waiting for a real counterweight: a kind Comanche, or a decent Sioux. It never happens. (To be fair, McMurtry does have Gus take a few stabs at articulating why the Native Americans aren’t always hospitable. “We won more than our share with the natives,” he remarks near the end of the novel. They didn’t invite us here, you know. We got no call to be vengeful.” And earlier, he puzzles Call by saying, “I think we spent our best years fighting on the wrong side.” I don’t think this is enough, but it’s something.)Other than that … it’s hard to complain. Lonesome Dove doesn’t close with a climactic shootout like you might find in other westerns. But it doesn’t need to. The journey—Gus and Call’s last shot at big, unnecessary adventure—is the point.And it’s a masterpiece.

The item itself was new so no issues there. I started reading the book, but could not stay with it for any length of time. Lots of characters and lots of introductory writing into these characters and there part in the story.Made it hard to keep up with who is who and how they all relate to one another.I can’t say it is one of my favorite books, but then maybe it’s not for me. It’ll take me a life time to get through what exactly is the gist of this book. Reviews that I read were one sided but I bought the book anyway. My bad.

100% recommend to anyone wanting to absolutely fall in love with a novel. I think about this book at least once a week and I’ve reread it probably 15 times.

What a read! You’ll fall in love with Lonesome Dove and the cast of characters. It did’n git no Gosh darn Pulitzer Prize fer nuttin. Ten stars!

In Larry McMurtry’s 1985 modern classic Lonesome Dove, McMurtry creates a western that is both epic and grand, and that covers quite a bit of ground, both literally and figuratively. I think one of the more remarkable traits is the author’s ability to take so many different individual stories and pack and blend them into one sprawling, long-standing journey.At its definitive core, Lonesome Dove explores a great many characters—flawed and human—and their perennial and continual search, whether that search be internally or externally. It feels like the characters are always looking for something better and to gain a better meaning or place in life.In the case of two of our principle characters, Captain Woodrow Call and Augustus “Gus” McRae, this comes in the form of an exodus from the small town of Lonesome Dove across state lines. When the two are not exchanging verbal jabs at each other, Call and Gus are leading members of the Hat Creek Outfit and others across states towards their destination of Montana in the hopes of grander prospects. However, along the way, they encounter conflicts and dangers, trials, and obstacles, from Mother Nature, nefarious individuals, villains, and rogues of all sorts.I feel like this is a work whose sum and totality are more impactful than some of its smaller parts and episodes. We have various episodic character subplots that are revolving and happening simultaneously, and McMurtry allows these subplots to often converge so seamlessly.However, I just felt like there were a few character threads that I was less than enthusiastic about (either because the characters were unremarkable or not that impactful for the entirety of the story). I felt like we were zeroing in on these characters too much, and they were getting too much “airtime.” (July’s wife Elmira is one such example.) I felt tempted to skim over these sections because I wasn’t very invested in the characters, or didn’t think these segments were that critical.That being said, a couple of the characters who I felt were interesting were Newt Dobbs and Joshua Deets. Newt is a young man who joins the trek with others, but his ignorance into this rugged lifestyle is an eye opening, coming of age and sometimes painful experience as he learns many harsh life lessons. Another impactful character in the novel was Deets, who is a lifetime member of the Hat Creek Outfit. As the only Black man who is member of the group, he does face difficulties and unfair treatment at points (which, unfortunately, was a product of the times). He is a strong, principled character who is important to Newt during this journey as well as the others for his knowledge and experience.In this massive exodus we embark on, Lonesome Dove explores many prevalent themes, including duty and honor, faithfulness, the changing of the guard, romance, coming of age and death. The story and volume of the work is vast in its scope, and it is an enduring and memorable expedition for the characters as well as the readers.

Perfect. My boyfriend and I both love the movie. And for his birthday he want the book. Came on time. He is thrilled and loves it. Thick book. 858 pages. When he is gone to work I will read it.

This was an amazing book!! I grew so attached to the characters throughout the book. I wasn't expecting much but this just blew me away. The struggle and difficulty traveling was so intense. Highly recommended this of your looking for a standalone western. Yes, it's long but so worth it. I wanted more at the end!