Lonesome Dove
by Larry McMurtry
Summary
Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call are former Texas Rangers running a livery stable in a dusty settlement on the Rio Grande. Gus talks, drinks and thinks; Call works and does not speak. When an old comrade turns up with a description of Montana, unfenced and empty, Call decides they will steal a herd out of Mexico and drive it two and a half thousand miles north, and everyone goes along because Call has decided.
The company is the book. Newt, seventeen, whose parentage everyone but Newt understands. Deets, the scout, who is better than any of them. Pea Eye. Lorena, the young prostitute who wants to see San Francisco and whom Gus loves. Clara, the woman Gus should have married, now running a horse ranch in Nebraska. Blue Duck, the raider, who is the most frightening figure in the genre.
They cross rivers full of snakes, lose men to lightning and drowning and hanging, and much of the dying is sudden, stupid and entirely without meaning, which is McMurtry's real argument.
The two old men are the reason it works. Gus is idle, greedy, vain and the wisest person in the book. Call cannot say a kind word to anyone, including the boy everyone knows is his son, and will keep a promise across a continent at absurd cost because keeping it is all he has instead of a self.
It is eight hundred and fifty pages and it moves like a book a third that length, largely on the strength of the talk, which is as good as dialogue gets in American fiction.
Be ready for it to be very funny for six hundred pages and then to take almost all of it back, and for the violence, when it arrives, to be quick and unheroic. Best for readers who are sure they do not like westerns.
Historical Context & Significance
Lonesome Dove won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, awarded on 17 April that year.
Larry McMurtry said repeatedly that he wrote it to demythologise the Old West, and that readers insisted on receiving it as the most romantic western ever written, which he found both funny and slightly defeating. He originally developed the material in the 1970s as a screenplay for John Wayne, James Stewart and Henry Fonda, which was never made.
The 1989 CBS miniseries with Robert Duvall as Gus and Tommy Lee Jones as Call drew enormous audiences and won several Emmy Awards, and remains for many viewers the definitive screen western. McMurtry added three more books to the sequence, and also wrote The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment and shared an Academy Award for the screenplay of Brokeback Mountain. He died in 2021.