LONESOME DOVE by LARRY McMURTRY (1985)

Second reading


Almost all Americans of a certain age are familiar with the plot of Lonesome Dove, if not from the book then from the the award-winning and extremely popular television series from the '80s. It has everything a Western should have -- former Texas Rangers, a whore with a heart, a cattle drive, cowboys, Indians, outlaws, hangings, stampeding cattle, battles with the elements, a sheriff chasing a killer, and so forth. It differs from the plots of traditional Westerns only in that it doesn't always deliver the expected. It also contains remarkable dialogue and a depth of characterization not usually found in the genre.

For those few not familiar with the story, it recounts the events of a cattle drive from South Texas to Montana, led by two aging Texas Rangers. It takes McMurtry more than 150 pages to introduce the major characters and actually get them started on the drive, and I found myself getting weary and bored. But once the author gets the story (and the herd) rolling, it moves at breakneck pace, with one cliff-hanging incident after another. McMurtry is quite a yarn spinner, so the rest of the 800+ page book held my attention to the end and didn't seem long at all.

I have never seen the television adaptation of Lonesome Dove, but surely McMurtry must have anticipated that his novel would someday be the basis of a screen treatment, because it seems to me to employ a very cinematic approach to novel writing. I believe one could write the screenplay using the author's dialogue exactly as written in the book. I intend to search for the video of the production to find out if that is so.

I would not classify this as Literary Fiction (high-brow, meaningful, etc.), but it is very good at what it does, which is tell a mesmerizing story. It is somewhat surprising to me that it won the Pulitzer Prize, but I recommend it as an example of how to take stock story elements and make them interesting again just through the vividness of the telling.