Good Westerns Never Die

Natasha Simons
May 27 2014
Share Good Westerns Never Die

I discovered Lonesome Dove on a bookshelf at work a few years ago. I was about to go to Texas on vacation and figured it might make for good atmospheric reading. Although it had, to my mind, acquired a somewhat cheesy reputation, and I had never much enjoyed Westerns anyway, I picked it up and brought it with me—and was immediately engrossed from the airport onward. The writing was everything I always wished Cormac McCarthy’s neo-Westerns would be: sharp, flowing, wry, poignant—yet never too full of itself, and never above the feelings he generates. Larry McMurtry’s wonderful gift is his ability to create expansive portraits with a remarkable scarcity of language. The book is over eight hundred pages long, but the words on the page are precise and to the point. He never uses more than he needs in order to put the look and feel and even taste of the American West into one’s mind. It is truly a perfect reading experience, a book for people who want to be swept away.

In short order, I knew exactly the personalities at work in Gus, Call, Jake, Lori—and those plucky pigs. As the New York Times wrote of the book, “These are real people, and they are still larger than life.” The characters in these pages are fully formed, and yet not given to us so easily. One of the most fascinating things about the book is how much it holds back from telling you what anyone is feeling or thinking; in another book, it would be incredibly frustrating, but here, it simply adds to the mystery of human action, an ongoing and fraught question within Lonesome Dove.

Lonesome Dove is an epic read in the tradition of Homer: a story about hardship, the worthiness and sometimes foolhardiness of being brave, the valor of the American warrior known as the cowboy, the end of the West, the fierce ties that bind people together, and the finality and unpredictability of death. It is a searing book, and worth revisiting.

 

Lonesome Dove
Larry McMurtry

A love story, an adventure, and an epic of the frontier, this Pulitzer Prize— winning classic is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness of America. Journey to the dusty little Texas town of Lonesome Dove and meet an unforgettable assortment of heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settlers. Richly authentic, beautifully written, always dramatic this is a book to that will make you laugh, weep, and dream.

Amazon logo Audible logo Barnes & Noble logo Books a Million logo Google Play logo iBooks logo Bookshop logo
Close

You must be logged in to add books to your shelf.

Please log in or sign up now.