Josh Deets. Served with me 30 years. Fought In 21 engagements with the Comanche and the Kiowa. Cheerful in all weathers. Never shirked a task. Splendid behavior.
I had wet eyes immediately following Deets death but the tears were just pouring out at his funeral. I felt like Newt, who the book describes as being blind from crying so much.
the other moment that made me cry was July meeting Elmira in town and saying “i guess we’ve got a family of our own now” to no response from the mother of his child
I teared up at the words "Served with me 30 years". The sign isn't really a grave marker so much as a diary entry; he served with me, Call. This is the most vulnerable thing Call has ever done and it absolutely broke my heart.
I finished the book in a daze last week, so most of my thoughts are colored by that experience. However, one little thing that I keep returning to is the way that Elmira's death sort of floats into the narrative before it actually happens. In a lot of ways, she's dead from the moment we meet her—having abandoned a life that was miserable but familiar for one that's miserable in unfamiliar ways. So it's fitting that her death is mostly a footnote, because there wasn't any other way for it to end for her. It's really bleak stuff.
Really depressing - so well-executed, the amount of words, basically, dedicated to each death says a lot about how these guys / this society values (or doesn't) human life. She gets about as much to her passing as Janey.
Janey should've had the chance to make it to Clara's. Also, speaking of Janey's death, I think that Roscoe might've had the longest death we've seen? Him not really knowing what's going on does contribute to your point about lack of value on life.
I was so behind on Lonesome Dove until this past week (I think I got maybe halfway through?) and then this weekend I plunked myself down on the couch and didn’t just catch up but completely finished it. Took me a few days; I hit the rescue sequence where Gus finds Lorie and Blue Duck murders the rest of the party, went to bed upset, and woke up mad at McMurtry the next morning. Couldn’t put the book down after that, though.
I get why Gus has been carrying a torch for Clara for twenty years—out of all the characters in the book, I think she’s my favorite (although Newt’s a close second). Call’s terrifying when he beats the shit out of the soldier and McMurtry makes the violence so scary and so compelling; I could see it in my head as I was reading it.
I have not had horehound candy but am game to try it. Newt does not cry too much. I would be crying twice as often. He is growing up to be a fine young man. I have never been to Montana.
After reading the Clara section of the book, I actually put the book down for about a week to read another travel story (The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles). I wanted to savor this section because it was a brief respite from the never-ending cattle drive and gives the reader a chance to catch a breath and think about what's really important - in the characters' lives but also in my own. I am a big Clara fan. She has more balls than most of the men in the book.
While Gus appears to be front and center in the book, Call is slowly coming to the surface and plays a key role as the book ends. McMurtry reveals Call slowly on purpose, but the fight scene was a clue as to what Call can and will do. His fight was not much different than the fight between the bear and the bull.
When I was younger and would watch the miniseries on VHS, I'd stop during tape 3, after Clara's section because it was as you wrote, a much-needed respite . . . and I knew what followed this brief period of rest.
I love the comparison you made between Call's fight scene and the bear and the bull's scene!
I did accidentally finish the book a little after midnight last Wednesday because I simply could not stop breathing it in... many gut punches. I will miss Josh Deets forever.
Favorite Gus-isms from the week's reading
"Why in hell would anybody think they wanted to take cattle to Montana?"
"We thought it would be a good place to sit back and watch 'em shit."
"It's hard to enjoy a metropolis like this if you've got nothing but your hands in your pockets."
Clara Allen is Mother of All Time, and deserves all the magazines she wants to read and would have loved Substack.
Just before Jake dies, Gus tells him they got Lorie back and he asks, "who?" then later, I think after Lorie decides to stay with Clara, she thinks about how she barely even remembers Jake. I thought this was interesting bc in Jake's case it almost felt cruel? but also a little dreamy, like as though he had so many memories passing through his mind at once - times with Gus and Call, or memories where he can cast himself as more heroic than he actually was/is. With Lorie's memories fading, it feels different? Jake is just another disappointing man who promised her things he never intended to deliver. I don't know if that holds but I think about these scenes of fading memory a lot.
Deets asking about "little Newt" before he dies really got me this time! I've read this before, so I know after Clara's section comes Deets's death. I'm never emotionally prepared for this death.
I love them "forgetting" each other - they both felt like versions of the same thing, memories and events slipping into and away from each other. I don't really think Jake was being cruel so much as his life is just melting. He lets everything slip by him - an act that's probably easier if memory doesn't hold strong. But Lorie "forgetting" him -- woof, that moved me!!!
Literally from the moment I read about Clara I decided my goal in life going forward is to be Clara. I DO NOT RECOMMEND reading the prequels in which Clara is essentially a talking dog. I *DID* buy Anjelica Huston's second memoir hoping to read about her experience being Clara
I can't wait to talk about the miniseries in here, but Anjelica Huston's casting and performance are probably my favorite aspect of the miniseries (which I generally think is very good)
I rewatched the miniseries after the first week of McMurtry May and I thought it held up quite well! I'm so impressed with the casting (even the horses!)
ok ok ok at first I was like - sounds awesome... I think this book gets a little that way too, tbh - but the happenings are so bleak leading up to that that it felt welcome
When I read lonesome dove the first time, when I was 14 or so, Deets’ death was the first one that absolutely hollowed me, especially the funeral. This time around, as it was approaching, I thought “maybe I’ll just skip over this a bit,” but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It’s a testament to McMurtry’s grasp of craft that he is able to tell such a bitter story with such a sense of humor and, for lack of a better word, adventure.
Spoon dying like pathetic dog at the hands of his oldest friends, who have lost so much and so many on this stupid journey that Spoon set them on in the first place, is so profoundly bleak, and yet you never feel like the length of the book, or the grinding, miserable events contained within, are punishing you the way might reading a certain other 1983 anti-western Great American Novel candidate.
It's never a bad time to read Blood Meridian as I think it really does live up to all the hype and is one of the great novels, but I think after 900 pages of sad and tender cowboy action that ends with three brutal gut punches and one of the bleakest, most subversive final sentences in American literature it would be worth it, both for your mental health and for a better understanding of what McMurtry and McCarthy are revising/going against in their anti/revisionist westerns, reading some of the classic non-revisionist, non-anti westerns, many of which are quite good. Riders Of The Purple Sage by Zane Grey basically invented everything we think of as a "Western," so it can read as a bit simple in terms of plot, but it's a good time and features evil Mormons, which is cool once-common Western trope that mostly died out by the time they were making talkies about cowboys. Shane by Jack Schaefer or Last of The Breed (or the Sackett books) by Louis L'Amour are also beloved classics for a good reason.
That said, if you want something bleak, violent, surreal with an intense, sometimes downright hostile reading experience, by all means dive straight into Blood Meridian. There are long stretches of that book that use the English language in such a way that it blows my mind entirely, even after having read it 9 or 10 times at this point in my life.
Also this: "It was a beautiful morning, too—mountains seemed closer. Newt wondered if Deets knew about any of it. He didn't look at the corpse again, but he wondered if Deets had kept on knowing, somehow. He felt he did. He felt that if anyone was taking any notice of him, it was probably Deets, who had always been his friend. It was only the thought that Deets was still knowing him, somehow, that kept him from feeling totally alone." bye!!!!
i finished the book early this week because i physically could not stop reading. phenomenal. but we’ll get to that…my annotation color designated for “themes of fatherhood” really filled up this section. poor newt, being surrounded by heroes is good for inspiration, but they are not very good dads. also jake spoon’s death blew me away, i was sitting in bed at like one in the morning with my bf asleep next to me and i went “oh my fucking god” out loud when i realized what was about to happen. intense stuff.
I sort of felt like Newt in that section - he's a good audience surrogate much of the time, especially there - being like "wait is this actually a hanging crime? Do they HAVE to do this?" I was also kinda moved by the youngest Suggs being like man what the hell.
it's especially tragic because (in Newt's eyes), Jake is literally *incapable* of committing such heinous crimes, surely he must be innocent or wasn't involved... and to see him hanged within an hour of capture is just having his world turned upside down. Poor, poor Newt (and of course poor Wilbarger + everyone else that the Suggs murdered). Jake Spoon remains the biggest weenie
I loved when Call was trying to buy some horses from Clara and was SO put out that a) he has to do business with a woman and b) that she would not back down on the price, and ended with him riding off in a huff. Don't mess with Clara, she knows her worth!
The bull vs. bear scene sent me on a former-English-lit-major black hole trying to figure out what does it MEAN. My running theory is either the bear represents the wilderness of the un-settled land and the bull represents the team and the fight is their journey to Montana, which will ultimately be successful but not before taking some major collateral damage (RIP, like, half of the crew).
That, or McMurtry just thought a bear and a bull fighting would be really fucking cool.
The scene of the younger cowboys coming into town and spending all their money on candy was surprisingly touching - you forget that they are essentially just boys forced to live an extremely rough and violent life.
I've had horehound candy a long time ago and I seem to remember it tasting a lot like Jägermeister - kinda sweet, kinda medicinal.
I was struck by the whiplash that came with Jake Spoon's story in these last couple weeks. After he leaves Lorie to go gamble, I had no problem calling him a bum and wishing he would just fuck off and leave the group alone. Then he gets sucked into the Suggs' orbit and I spent the whole time hoping he could get out of there, knowing it was not going to end well at all.
As someone also named Martin, I loved Clara proclaiming it as a nice name for a man. Thank you, Clara!
I keep finding myself testing my visual acuity on walks lol—need to know how I’d stack up against Gus and Deets. This book and its parlance are really sticking with me, especially the word “passel”. It’s always a pleasure for a book to bleed into my consciousness. I love that McMurtry makes us all fall in love with Clara, then uses her to take Call down a peg.
Her beef with Call is interesting - and though we've had 600-odd pages to get to know and admire him, as dry as he is sometimes, she's known him much much longer and also sporadically - this is a long-held grudge. I felt she was being too harsh at first, but considering her life on the prairie has been no picnic grants her some degree of perspective. Her life is no harder than his - maybe harder - and she finds it within herself to act with much more humanity.
Despite the horrors, the book just keeps getting lovelier and lovelier! Some highlights:
- Love everything about Clara, but especially this passage: “Clara noticed the beauty and thought it strange that she could still respond to it, tired as she was and with two people dying in her house—perhaps three. But she loved the fine light of the prairie mornings; it had resurrected her spirits time after time through the years, when it seemed that dirt and cold and death would crush her. Just to see the light spreading like that, far on toward Wyoming, was her joy.”
- Also this: “The birth might take another day. Everything took longer than it should, or else went too quick. Her sons’ lives had been whipped away like a breath, while her husband had lain motionless for two months and still wasn’t dead. It was wearying, trying to adjust to all the paces life required.” And yet! I feel like Clara, more than anyone else in the novel besides Gus, finds the rhythm.
- Love this meta-commentary about the smallness of their world: “‘Why, Sheriff Johnson,’ Augustus said. ‘I guess, as they say, it’s a small world.’ ‘Just to you, Gus, you’ve met everybody in it now, I’m sure,’ Clara said.”
- Bear v. Bull is so random… feels like a Smash Bros matchup
I did think - right before the "I guess, as they say, it's a small world" moment, "man, it's a small world." There were so many fewer people alive back then for one!!!!
That's actually a great point... and I guess the people who were alive were so provincial that literally anybody who ever visited other towns (e.g. Rangers or cattlement) would functionally be celebs
Read most of this book outside - at train stops, in the park, on the fire escape. I read it in a perpetual state of 57 degrees no windchill. I finished it yesterday and I had been groaning about wanting it to wrap up to my partner. Immediately after it ended I wished I still had more.
Josh Deets. Served with me 30 years. Fought In 21 engagements with the Comanche and the Kiowa. Cheerful in all weathers. Never shirked a task. Splendid behavior.
"Splendid behavior" is what got me to shed real tears, RIP Deetsy
I had wet eyes immediately following Deets death but the tears were just pouring out at his funeral. I felt like Newt, who the book describes as being blind from crying so much.
the other moment that made me cry was July meeting Elmira in town and saying “i guess we’ve got a family of our own now” to no response from the mother of his child
I teared up at the words "Served with me 30 years". The sign isn't really a grave marker so much as a diary entry; he served with me, Call. This is the most vulnerable thing Call has ever done and it absolutely broke my heart.
The narrative voice using Deets’s full name - Josh Deets - after his death is such an effective, affecting trick. That entire chapter hollowed me out.
I believe the narration did something similar in the last section, switching to Augustus when he takes off to rescue Lorie
I finished the book in a daze last week, so most of my thoughts are colored by that experience. However, one little thing that I keep returning to is the way that Elmira's death sort of floats into the narrative before it actually happens. In a lot of ways, she's dead from the moment we meet her—having abandoned a life that was miserable but familiar for one that's miserable in unfamiliar ways. So it's fitting that her death is mostly a footnote, because there wasn't any other way for it to end for her. It's really bleak stuff.
Really depressing - so well-executed, the amount of words, basically, dedicated to each death says a lot about how these guys / this society values (or doesn't) human life. She gets about as much to her passing as Janey.
Janey should've had the chance to make it to Clara's. Also, speaking of Janey's death, I think that Roscoe might've had the longest death we've seen? Him not really knowing what's going on does contribute to your point about lack of value on life.
So scary and sad
I was so behind on Lonesome Dove until this past week (I think I got maybe halfway through?) and then this weekend I plunked myself down on the couch and didn’t just catch up but completely finished it. Took me a few days; I hit the rescue sequence where Gus finds Lorie and Blue Duck murders the rest of the party, went to bed upset, and woke up mad at McMurtry the next morning. Couldn’t put the book down after that, though.
I get why Gus has been carrying a torch for Clara for twenty years—out of all the characters in the book, I think she’s my favorite (although Newt’s a close second). Call’s terrifying when he beats the shit out of the soldier and McMurtry makes the violence so scary and so compelling; I could see it in my head as I was reading it.
Have not had horehound candy but want to try it.
I have not had horehound candy but am game to try it. Newt does not cry too much. I would be crying twice as often. He is growing up to be a fine young man. I have never been to Montana.
After reading the Clara section of the book, I actually put the book down for about a week to read another travel story (The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles). I wanted to savor this section because it was a brief respite from the never-ending cattle drive and gives the reader a chance to catch a breath and think about what's really important - in the characters' lives but also in my own. I am a big Clara fan. She has more balls than most of the men in the book.
While Gus appears to be front and center in the book, Call is slowly coming to the surface and plays a key role as the book ends. McMurtry reveals Call slowly on purpose, but the fight scene was a clue as to what Call can and will do. His fight was not much different than the fight between the bear and the bull.
wow yes good point with the bear and bull
And how was The Lincoln Highway....?
It was surprisingly satisfying. Sort of a blend of The Catcher in the Rye and Holes. I have now read everything by Amor Towles.
When I was younger and would watch the miniseries on VHS, I'd stop during tape 3, after Clara's section because it was as you wrote, a much-needed respite . . . and I knew what followed this brief period of rest.
I love the comparison you made between Call's fight scene and the bear and the bull's scene!
I did accidentally finish the book a little after midnight last Wednesday because I simply could not stop breathing it in... many gut punches. I will miss Josh Deets forever.
Favorite Gus-isms from the week's reading
"Why in hell would anybody think they wanted to take cattle to Montana?"
"We thought it would be a good place to sit back and watch 'em shit."
"It's hard to enjoy a metropolis like this if you've got nothing but your hands in your pockets."
Clara Allen is Mother of All Time, and deserves all the magazines she wants to read and would have loved Substack.
omg true she would have loved blogs...
Just before Jake dies, Gus tells him they got Lorie back and he asks, "who?" then later, I think after Lorie decides to stay with Clara, she thinks about how she barely even remembers Jake. I thought this was interesting bc in Jake's case it almost felt cruel? but also a little dreamy, like as though he had so many memories passing through his mind at once - times with Gus and Call, or memories where he can cast himself as more heroic than he actually was/is. With Lorie's memories fading, it feels different? Jake is just another disappointing man who promised her things he never intended to deliver. I don't know if that holds but I think about these scenes of fading memory a lot.
Deets asking about "little Newt" before he dies really got me this time! I've read this before, so I know after Clara's section comes Deets's death. I'm never emotionally prepared for this death.
I love them "forgetting" each other - they both felt like versions of the same thing, memories and events slipping into and away from each other. I don't really think Jake was being cruel so much as his life is just melting. He lets everything slip by him - an act that's probably easier if memory doesn't hold strong. But Lorie "forgetting" him -- woof, that moved me!!!
Literally from the moment I read about Clara I decided my goal in life going forward is to be Clara. I DO NOT RECOMMEND reading the prequels in which Clara is essentially a talking dog. I *DID* buy Anjelica Huston's second memoir hoping to read about her experience being Clara
I can't wait to talk about the miniseries in here, but Anjelica Huston's casting and performance are probably my favorite aspect of the miniseries (which I generally think is very good)
I rewatched the miniseries after the first week of McMurtry May and I thought it held up quite well! I'm so impressed with the casting (even the horses!)
Can you elaborate on talking dog here
like not a full real human being just an amusing novelty...... a WOMAN?! who is SMART!? whaT?
ok ok ok at first I was like - sounds awesome... I think this book gets a little that way too, tbh - but the happenings are so bleak leading up to that that it felt welcome
When I read lonesome dove the first time, when I was 14 or so, Deets’ death was the first one that absolutely hollowed me, especially the funeral. This time around, as it was approaching, I thought “maybe I’ll just skip over this a bit,” but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It’s a testament to McMurtry’s grasp of craft that he is able to tell such a bitter story with such a sense of humor and, for lack of a better word, adventure.
Spoon dying like pathetic dog at the hands of his oldest friends, who have lost so much and so many on this stupid journey that Spoon set them on in the first place, is so profoundly bleak, and yet you never feel like the length of the book, or the grinding, miserable events contained within, are punishing you the way might reading a certain other 1983 anti-western Great American Novel candidate.
Spoon death so crazy and so forecast for like 700 pages and yet! He still finds a way to make it surprising
is Blood Meridian a good follow-up to this tho?
I'll let Phil take this one
It's never a bad time to read Blood Meridian as I think it really does live up to all the hype and is one of the great novels, but I think after 900 pages of sad and tender cowboy action that ends with three brutal gut punches and one of the bleakest, most subversive final sentences in American literature it would be worth it, both for your mental health and for a better understanding of what McMurtry and McCarthy are revising/going against in their anti/revisionist westerns, reading some of the classic non-revisionist, non-anti westerns, many of which are quite good. Riders Of The Purple Sage by Zane Grey basically invented everything we think of as a "Western," so it can read as a bit simple in terms of plot, but it's a good time and features evil Mormons, which is cool once-common Western trope that mostly died out by the time they were making talkies about cowboys. Shane by Jack Schaefer or Last of The Breed (or the Sackett books) by Louis L'Amour are also beloved classics for a good reason.
That said, if you want something bleak, violent, surreal with an intense, sometimes downright hostile reading experience, by all means dive straight into Blood Meridian. There are long stretches of that book that use the English language in such a way that it blows my mind entirely, even after having read it 9 or 10 times at this point in my life.
"Splendid behaviour" reallyyyy got me and continues to get me
Also this: "It was a beautiful morning, too—mountains seemed closer. Newt wondered if Deets knew about any of it. He didn't look at the corpse again, but he wondered if Deets had kept on knowing, somehow. He felt he did. He felt that if anyone was taking any notice of him, it was probably Deets, who had always been his friend. It was only the thought that Deets was still knowing him, somehow, that kept him from feeling totally alone." bye!!!!
that entire chapter is tear soaked, mcmurtry just keeps twisting the knife
i finished the book early this week because i physically could not stop reading. phenomenal. but we’ll get to that…my annotation color designated for “themes of fatherhood” really filled up this section. poor newt, being surrounded by heroes is good for inspiration, but they are not very good dads. also jake spoon’s death blew me away, i was sitting in bed at like one in the morning with my bf asleep next to me and i went “oh my fucking god” out loud when i realized what was about to happen. intense stuff.
I sort of felt like Newt in that section - he's a good audience surrogate much of the time, especially there - being like "wait is this actually a hanging crime? Do they HAVE to do this?" I was also kinda moved by the youngest Suggs being like man what the hell.
it's especially tragic because (in Newt's eyes), Jake is literally *incapable* of committing such heinous crimes, surely he must be innocent or wasn't involved... and to see him hanged within an hour of capture is just having his world turned upside down. Poor, poor Newt (and of course poor Wilbarger + everyone else that the Suggs murdered). Jake Spoon remains the biggest weenie
Wilbarger and Gus's final scene together is so good
I loved when Call was trying to buy some horses from Clara and was SO put out that a) he has to do business with a woman and b) that she would not back down on the price, and ended with him riding off in a huff. Don't mess with Clara, she knows her worth!
The bull vs. bear scene sent me on a former-English-lit-major black hole trying to figure out what does it MEAN. My running theory is either the bear represents the wilderness of the un-settled land and the bull represents the team and the fight is their journey to Montana, which will ultimately be successful but not before taking some major collateral damage (RIP, like, half of the crew).
That, or McMurtry just thought a bear and a bull fighting would be really fucking cool.
The scene of the younger cowboys coming into town and spending all their money on candy was surprisingly touching - you forget that they are essentially just boys forced to live an extremely rough and violent life.
I've had horehound candy a long time ago and I seem to remember it tasting a lot like Jägermeister - kinda sweet, kinda medicinal.
OK Jagermeister comp is really good.. maybe I WOULD like it. I love that Newt goes on to name his HORSE Candy too.
I was struck by the whiplash that came with Jake Spoon's story in these last couple weeks. After he leaves Lorie to go gamble, I had no problem calling him a bum and wishing he would just fuck off and leave the group alone. Then he gets sucked into the Suggs' orbit and I spent the whole time hoping he could get out of there, knowing it was not going to end well at all.
As someone also named Martin, I loved Clara proclaiming it as a nice name for a man. Thank you, Clara!
I did keep wondering what was stopping Spoon from just riding off - but that's just the thing, he could have found a way and just never did.
I keep finding myself testing my visual acuity on walks lol—need to know how I’d stack up against Gus and Deets. This book and its parlance are really sticking with me, especially the word “passel”. It’s always a pleasure for a book to bleed into my consciousness. I love that McMurtry makes us all fall in love with Clara, then uses her to take Call down a peg.
Her beef with Call is interesting - and though we've had 600-odd pages to get to know and admire him, as dry as he is sometimes, she's known him much much longer and also sporadically - this is a long-held grudge. I felt she was being too harsh at first, but considering her life on the prairie has been no picnic grants her some degree of perspective. Her life is no harder than his - maybe harder - and she finds it within herself to act with much more humanity.
Despite the horrors, the book just keeps getting lovelier and lovelier! Some highlights:
- Love everything about Clara, but especially this passage: “Clara noticed the beauty and thought it strange that she could still respond to it, tired as she was and with two people dying in her house—perhaps three. But she loved the fine light of the prairie mornings; it had resurrected her spirits time after time through the years, when it seemed that dirt and cold and death would crush her. Just to see the light spreading like that, far on toward Wyoming, was her joy.”
- Also this: “The birth might take another day. Everything took longer than it should, or else went too quick. Her sons’ lives had been whipped away like a breath, while her husband had lain motionless for two months and still wasn’t dead. It was wearying, trying to adjust to all the paces life required.” And yet! I feel like Clara, more than anyone else in the novel besides Gus, finds the rhythm.
- Love this meta-commentary about the smallness of their world: “‘Why, Sheriff Johnson,’ Augustus said. ‘I guess, as they say, it’s a small world.’ ‘Just to you, Gus, you’ve met everybody in it now, I’m sure,’ Clara said.”
- Bear v. Bull is so random… feels like a Smash Bros matchup
Bear v Bull giving Elden Ring mod Youtube vids
I did think - right before the "I guess, as they say, it's a small world" moment, "man, it's a small world." There were so many fewer people alive back then for one!!!!
That's actually a great point... and I guess the people who were alive were so provincial that literally anybody who ever visited other towns (e.g. Rangers or cattlement) would functionally be celebs
Read most of this book outside - at train stops, in the park, on the fire escape. I read it in a perpetual state of 57 degrees no windchill. I finished it yesterday and I had been groaning about wanting it to wrap up to my partner. Immediately after it ended I wished I still had more.
Streets of Laredo here we come
Streets of Laredo September??