It’s Time For You To Read ‘Lonesome Dove’

I bought Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove from a small bookstore in the Berkshires last winter. When I brought it up to the counter the store’s owner—a guy whose small, round glasses, wild gray hair, and cozy cardigan gave me the impression that he was wearing a Quaint Bookstore Owner costume—made a bit of a deal out of the purchase. He told me how much he loved the book, and how much I was going to love it, and then he said this: “There’s one sentence in this book, that when you read it, you’ll say, ‘Ah, he wrote this whole book just so he could use that sentence.'” Thanks a lot, man. This book is 858 pages long.

Though I still don’t appreciate the little riddle that bookseller saddled me with—I have no idea what sentence he was referring to—I can now understand the way his face lit up when he saw me place the book next to the register. Lonesome Dove is by no means an unheralded or overlooked novel, but I get the sense that in the years since it was published in 1985, all of its trappings—punishingly long, set in the Old West, full of familiar tropes—have made it a harder sell to new readers. I’ll admit going into it burdened by my own preconceived notions. I sort of assumed that I was picking up something akin to Gone With The Wind, but for Westerns—a foundational but blinkered work that might thrill me on a narrative or technical level, but would be no threat to surprise me. I guess I just figured that any book that was eventually turned into a four-part CBS miniseries starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones wasn’t likely to contain anything unexpected.

Maybe the bookseller said what he did because he wanted to make sure I would keep reading. I can kind of understand it: a mysterious tease is a good way to pique interest, and causes less of a scene than a more full-throated recommendation might. Because if that guy is anything like me, I think that what he really wanted to do in that moment was hop over the desk, grab me by the shirt, press his nose directly into my cheek and hiss, “Do you know how lucky you are? You’ve just purchased the best book you’ll ever read.”

I don’t have to worry about maintaining the kind of decorum that a small-town bookstore demands. Do you feel my breath on your face? I’ve got your shirt collar wrapped around my fist, and I am telling you with as much urgency and passion as I can muster that if you have not read Lonesome Dove, now is the time to do that. It’s the best book you’ll ever read.

How shall I sell you on it? A concise plot summary would say that the book is about a cattle drive, undertaken for no good reason, by a group of flawed but heroic cowboys struggling to find purpose in the last open days of the American frontier. The magic is in how much it accomplishes through that relatively simple premise, which is owed to the fact that Lonesome Dove is as successfully unbridled as any work of art can be. Over the course of 858 pages unfolds a story that never loses its pace, its daring, or its self-assuredness. You will fall into it as you would a dream, and once the book has you in its grip, you will be transported over and over again. You will in turns be reading a deadpan comedy about how guys can really annoy each other sometimes, an inglorious adventure story in which the heroes’ quest will bring on unspeakable violence and horror, a post-apocalyptic novel that considers and complicates the genocidal engine of progress, a tragedy about how the codes and systems of morality we construct for ourselves eventually break down and rot us from the inside out, and an intimate family drama about how easy it is for us to be crushed or saved by one another.

And when you’re done, it won’t leave you. I don’t think I’ve gone more than a few days without thinking about Lonesome Dove since I finished it in the spring. One particularly shocking death still plays over and over in my mind, and I can feel my chest clinch up every time. I return to individual characters, turning their fates over in my mind and thinking about what could have gone differently for them, and what I still want for them. I will never be able to wade into a lake or river without my eyes darting around to look for water moccasins. I’m not alone in this. I have one friend who is in a text thread with two other people who recently finished Lonesome Dove, which they use to periodically recall their favorite moments from the book.

The book’s staying power is down to two things. The first is McMurtry’s craftsmanship, which marries the big, broad ideas of an epic with the sparing, direct sentences of a more focused story. The book is as unbound by convention as it is within McMurtry’s constant grasp, to such a degree that it’s possible to imagine him having typed out the whole thing in one sitting. And then there are the characters, who arrive as familiar archetypes—the stoic, rule-bound cowboy and his loquacious, boozy partner, the prostitute with a hidden inner life, the terrifying Comanche killer—and then burst out of the constraints of the genre to become the kind of tragic, fully-realized characters who live on in the memory.

My only regret is that I read the bulk of Lonesome Dove in the winter months, when the pages-long descriptions of days spent on horseback on the scorching Western plains and nights spent weathering heart-stopping thunderstorms felt wasted on me as I huddled inside. So consider the timing of this recommendation a gift to you. Go to a bookstore and buy Lonesome Dove. Go outside and let the sun beat down on you for awhile, and then find a shady spot where the wind might still blow some dust into your mouth. Crack the book open, and don’t get up until you’re done.