There’s a passage close to the one you cited near the end of the book, Newt’s response to Call’s departure, that I’ve revisited countless times, and never fails to make me misty eyed:
“Looking at the Captain, Newt began to feel sadder than he had ever felt in his life. Just go on, he wanted to say. Go on, if it’s that hard. He felt too young; he didn’t want to be left with it all. He felt he couldn’t bear what was happening, it was so surprising.”
I read this for the first time last fall and fell in love with it, revisiting it for this book club has so fun. Your observations and insights got at the heart of what I loved about McMurty’s writing. Thank you Fran Mag :)
Streets of Laredo would be so fun!!! Did you read all the others in this series when you first read LD or just stick with that one? Either way, thank you for revising with us.
I’m skeptical of the rest of the books in the series, because coming out of LD and diving into Streets there’s a real sense of tension in that nobody is off limits and anyone could drop dead at any time, so the other entries being prequels strikes me as sort of weightless. Then again I’d probably eat that shit up, who am I kidding. I’m sure they’re pretty good!
I just read them in order of when they were written, but reading them chronologically could work too! Idk about you but after finishing LD I couldn't resist reading what happens next to our (remaining) heroes, so it was pretty easy for me to pick up SoL.
I cried too much on Sunday between watching The Heiress and finishing this book. In both cases I assumed it would be no big deal because I had seen/read these works before. Turns out like Newt I had more tears in me than I expected.
The last sentence of this book is insane. It’s already so bleak and it ends on a note of gothic despair. I believe the miniseries ended on Call and the journalist instead, because it’s just too haunting as a wrap up to this big saga. A lot of Westerns end with gunslinger figures who are kept out of the civilization they helped to create and preserve. McMurtry takes it a step further by sending Call home to a ruin.
McMurtry is an interesting revisionist. He gets close to making a kind of feminist critique of the West that could be too simplistic — Clara as a more well rounded matriarchal figure who offers community and safety in opposition to the violence the Hat Creek boys meet. But Clara is not capable of making a better world on her own. She needs help too, in the imperfect form of a few lovesick cowboys who stick around.
Call’s character comes to the fore in the last section, revealed arguably as the villain of the story — Gus without his charm and generosity. His name suggests a call to adventure, and McMurtry is not so hot on the idea of adventure. I tried doing a fantasy cast of Lonesome Dove with classic Western actors (didn’t get much further than a mustacheless Howard Keel as Jake Spoon), and I think both Call and Gus could have been Wayne in different modes — the more relaxed Wayne of Rio Bravo or the terrifying Wayne of The Searchers. Anyone who enjoyed Lonesome Dove and is interested in more Western movies might check out one of his best performances in Red River, another cattle drive epic about fathers and sons.
I love Pea Eye not getting the Newt-Call connection all the way to the end. I feel for him. I’ve never been much of a noticer.
I was compelled by Blythe's description of Clara as a "talking dog" in one of the prequels - what comes off as charming, world weariness here is kind of (for lack of better term) Mary Sueish earlier on, a woman who can do everything and calls it like it is.
I admire the randomness of Dish and Pea Eye's journeys - guys who are there and sometime useful and mostly stupid, who were granted the blessing of survival by just being lucky, right place right time. Many of their more (and less) competent peers can't say similarly.
End of the book really stunned me - real, like, flipping the page to see if something was missing. I'd not had this since the very excellent ending of Ferrante's Lying Lives of Adults and honestly Birnam Wood. No one knows how to end a book anymore, etc.
Call's journey home, or at least back, to find ruins, reminded me of the last section of Lord of the Rings that was excised from the film adaptations: Frodo and the hobbits return to their beloved shire only to find that the evil they were fighting has come home.
Interesting you say this because the original idea for Lonesome Dove was a screenplay (co-written with Peter Bogdanovic) with Wayne signed on to play Call (plus Jimmy Stewart as Gus and Henry Fonda as Jake Spoon).
Something incredibly small and dumb I kinda liked in this last chunk was the use of the word “rude” for “crude.” Like a rude shovel. Gonna incorporate this into my daily lingo for a while and see how it goes.
Anyway, haven’t stopped thinking about it since I finished last Friday. Clara’s final speech to Call? I cried. Big Xavier Wanz coming back to literally burn the house down on the last page? Damn. Also, while Pea Eye has been a good hang through much of the book, I noted weeks ago when I was looking up all the adaptations that Sam Shepard plays him in Streets of Laredo, so I knew he had to get up to something pretty special eventually. Dude walks a hundred miles naked through the snow with only Deets’s ghost looking out for him. Great stuff.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what duty means in this book, duty as a kind of bulletproof (except sometimes literally the opposite) vest that can shield you from intimacy and compassion. I think k that’s what makes the last stretch of the book so moving to me, the tragedy of this man who’s destroyed his own life and so many others all in the service of duty. And, in the end, he’s doomed to walk through a kind of lonely hell, severed from his son, most of his other few friends and loved ones dead. It’s a terribly bleak ending, but a brilliant one.
I already miss this book, but I also don’t know that I’m ready to go back in with one of the prequels or the sequel for a minute. I do think I might check out one of McMurtry’s sad guys and gals in Texas/New Mexico/LA books though. What an incredible month of reading!
omg Sam Shepard as Pea Eye is crazy... I love that
What's especially compelling to me about Call's sense of duty is that we're not ever witness to the origin / heyday of when this might have made him useful. He has sparks of brilliance in the book - but mostly his adherence to duty is destructive.
Highly rec Last Picture Show in terms of other McMurtry!
been thinking about Wanz' self-destruction a lot...a parallel to Call's refusal to stay in Montana and claim Newt? a metaphor for the ecological destruction wrought by colonization and cattle farming?
Dish Boggett hate thread not withstanding, I really loved this book and never would've read it otherwise. Thank you, Fran!!! Now that my vitriol is out of my system I will briefly praise the ending.
I was keeping an eye on Old Dog to see when he would eventually, symbolically die, and I thought that the bull vs bear showdown was sort of our replacement for that, but I was very interested to see that Old Dog did get to go out, and it was not with a bang but a whimper. He doesn't get killed, officially, he just kind of straggles towards the bag, lagging farther and farther until eventually, people realize he's probably been missing a couple of days, and is already dead. Nothing could be a better metaphor for the "extinction" Fran focused on, in my eyes. It's not something that happens in a single moment, but slowly, pointlessly, and hopelessly, as one by one men are picked off by the elements or their own foolishness, or just the times. The final scene, and final words, were shocking and painful, and in addition to piling one last serving of futility on Call, I think do Lorena a lot of respect, and acknowledge her rightful place in the center of this story.
P.S. it is so harsh that they ate the pigs :( It felt like they were finalizing Gus' death in a way. He may live on in their memories, kind of, but not to the extent that they need to actually honor his wishes (except Call who kind of needs an excuse to run away anyway). Life goes on and somebody's gotta get eaten.
There’s something about that in the preface, too - “And the blue pigs walked all the way to Montana just to be eaten. Life ain’t for sissies, as Augustus might have said.” Well damn, Larry
I do think this is the kind of book that you’ll always been aware of who you were and how you were living when you read it. In many ways, that is, for me, one of the chief appeals of The Big Book; whether it takes you a week or a month or a season to read it, there’s sort of an inevitable absorption of the characters and story into your own history because of its sheer volume. I haven’t read Lonesome Dove since 2011, so some of the details have been lost to me (and fun to revisit in these posts), but what feels most memorable was the experience of reading it—where I was at the time, how the characters spoke to me, what that chapter of my life felt like (mostly bad; I worked at a theme park). I’ve been contemplating a reread this summer, but 2nd volume of In Search of Lost Time may get me first…
This is sort of how I feel about Moby-Dick, which comes up every time there's an option for new book club, but that book is SO connected to early 2020 to me (and finished in the spring of that year after... well, school was done) that returning to it now would just feel not quite right. I think my life would have to be a little more different to appreciate it on a new level once again. Did you do any sequels/prequels or just LD?
Very much my experience with Moby-Dick—read it my first summer in NY when I was 23, broke, and going insane experiencing NY summer and it’s attending humidity for the first time. Sort of can’t imagine a better circumstance to encounter the first page of that book, and then, you know, the rest of it.
I haven’t read any of the other LD books! Only other McMurtry I’ve read is Last Picture Show, which is a slim volume and also sad as hell.
The other Western guy I love is Oakley Hall—I’m always banging the drum for Warlock, which I think is a masterpiece, but The Bad Lands is also really good.
TY Fran for yet another smashing book club! Dare I say the best book you’ve covered yet???
I think most (good) long books get at least a little boost from feeling like something of significance has been gathered over the journey of reading them, which makes it fitting that this one is literally about a journey. It kind of has to be this long so we can feel the miles, but because we have such richly drawn characters to spend them with and such plainly beautiful prose to hear about them by, the experience never feels like time being wasted but simply spent, and spent well.
It’s all so cohesive that I don’t have any dramatic new takeaways from the ending, but a few highlights:
- Call’s worldview getting pincer movement’d by Gus and Clara:
- Gus: “He turned his back on it, and now he ain’t about to admit that he made the wrong choice. He’d as soon kill himself. He’s got to keep trying to be the way he thinks he is, and he’s got to make out that he was always that way—it’s why he ain’t owned up to being your pa.”
- Clara: “He had gone through life feeling that he had known what should be done, and now a woman flung it at him that he hadn’t.”
- Also, Call “choking on himself. He felt he had failed in all he had tried to be: the good boy standing there was evidence of it.”
- Everything about Gus’s death is so touching, but especially his entire prolonged exchange with Call and his freak being matched exactly by Dr. Mobley
- The moving image of Clara “coming back to enjoyment” after Bob’s death, marked by her eating cake with relish
- Something very darkly funny about the whole Blue Duck finale — reminded me of Magnolia’s prologue. Plus it gives us this ICON: “‘You going?’ ‘No,’ Goodnight said. ‘I don’t attend hangings, although I’ve presided over some, of the homegrown sort. This is the longest conversation I’ve had in ten years. Goodbye.’”
- Using the sign as Gus’s grave marker… the names fade, but Hat Creek Cattle Company is forever </3
"This is the longest conversation I’ve had in ten years. Goodbye." might have been the ONLY thing I knew about this book and it did not disappoint.
The Blue Duck finale is so thrilling and strange as to become funny, in a sense - I still don't really completely get what McMurtry is doing with this character, but the whirlwind of his death, and how odd it is, lingers as a gesture towards the unknowable.
That's a great way of putting it! For all the finite points he puts on many of these characters' lives, it's definitely the ellipses that will stick with me
1. "The men wondered about Lorena. What had happened to her? What did she look like now? ... Dish, especially, could not keep his eyes off the little tent. He longed for a glimpse of her and kept imagining that any minute she would step out of the tent and look his way. Surely she remembered him; perhaps she would even wave, and call him over." (491). Sir, I'm sorry - did you just say, about the woman with whom you are not on speaking terms, after she has been rescued from kidnapping and brutal abuse 'maybe not that she's back, she'll wave at me' ????? WHAT? THE? FUCK? How self centered could you possibly be!!! This is one of the least compassionate lines in this book and it. made me so angry I genuinely had to stop reading for a bit.
2. " 'Did you get to see Lorie?' Dish asked point-blank... 'I seen her, she was drinking coffee,' Newt said. 'Yes, she always took coffee in the morning,' Lippy said, demonstrating a fmiliarity with Lorena's habits that offended Dish at once. 'Yes, and I'm sure you spied on her every opportunity you got," he said hotly... 'Dish don't allow low types like us the right to even to look at the girl.' ... It rankled [Dish] continually that Gus had all of Lorena's company, day after day." (547). This is a psychotic level of posessiveness. It frightens me. If I had a friend whose boyfriend spoke of them this way, let alone a random acquaintance of theirs who wouldn't stop staring at them from across the horse camp, I would tell them to sleep at my house.
3. "[Lorena] was so glad she wanted to run out to [Gus], but Dish Boggett was nearby, trimming his horse's feet, so she kept still. 'She's just fine, Gus,' Dish said, when Gus dismounted. 'I looked after her as best I could.' 'I'm much obliged,' Augustus said. 'She won't hardly even look at me, Dish said. He said it mildly, but he didn't feel it mildly. Lorena's indifference pained him more than anything he had ever experienced." (627). Shut the fuck up Dish. Really, more than anything you've ever experienced? You don't know her. Keep her name out of your mouth you JERK why should she look at you.
4. "Dish Boggett took no part in the conversation. He felt sad about Gus. He remembered that Gus had once lent him money to visit Lorena, and this memory lent another tone to his sadness... In his sadness came a hope that when the drive was over he could draw his wages and go back and win Lorena, after all... How he had envied Gus, for Lorena would smile at Gus, but she had never smiled at him. Now Gus was dead, and Dish determined to mention to the Captain that he wanted to draw his wages and leave as soon as the drive was finished." (806). Now this is just too much. Obviously I expected nothing less but it is still absolutely horrifying to read. The level of self-absorption here is off the charts there's really nothing to even say.
5. McMurtry knows he sucks because he named him Dishwater.
I hope the jury will find Dish Boggett guilty of being the worst guy ever and give a unanimous sentence to hanging. Far less deserving people have been hanged already.
Aside from Gus' extended death, I was disappointed by the book's ending and also thought I must have missed a chapter. But life isn't always tied up in pretty bows - it just moves on, and we better follow, or we will be trampled by some wayward cows or even buffalo. I always identified more with Call than Gus and was glad to see him take the lead toward the end of the book. While not necessarily complimentary, McMurtry stayed true to the character. It would have made sense for Gus to be buried at Clara's (as no-nonsense Clara suggested), but Call is single-minded in honoring his promise to Gus. He also needed to escape back to Texas where he belonged.
Thanks to Blythe for sharing how Lonesome Dove transformed her. Since I read this when I was 25, LD did not transform me per se but it did shape me into the person I am today. I learned a great deal about growing up from these characters, not only Call and Gus, but from the whole gang, especially my favorites: Clara, Newt, July, Deets, Roscoe, and Po Campo.
The long NYRB piece talks about how most McMurtry endings feel a little off, both to teach you a lesson for expecting something more concrete and perhaps because it's truer to his artistic vision of how the world works.
As far as Westerns go I've really only read recent revisionist versions: All the Pretty Horses a few summers ago, and now this. my closest comparisons for Lonesome Dove are epics in other genres, like The Stand or Lord of the Rings as I alluded to elsewhere. (I am soooo bad at geography, this book needs a map up front a la Middle-earth.)
I agree with one of our compatriots (Sam E iirc) that Blue Duck's lack of interiority is a glaring flaw. I'm not against depictions of real human Evil (I love David Lynch after all) but considering McMurtry's considerable strength for character development it's a shame that this fascinating and terrifying Native character isn't given more depth.
I do hope July and Clara hook up. If Gus + Lorena's May-December thing couldn't last, maybe they can make it work.
Call, what a sonuvabitch. I was so sad for Newt yet proud of him for this: "“No, I ain’t kin to nobody in this world,” Newt said bitterly. “I don’t want to be. I won’t be.”" Elmira at least had the conviction to ditch the kids she didn't want; Call lacks even that and can only express any paternal affection through violence and the gifts he offers as a goodbye.
what a book. very tempted to re-read the first few chapters just to enjoy the gang hanging out again, before they run into all that death.
Still processing the end (Call why you gotta leave Newt like that 😭) but want the record to show that I finished the other two Fran Magazine Mays in July and here I am today. Also killer last scene back in LD
great quote from the NYer's McMurtry obit: Don Graham, a professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin: “‘The Godfather’ was supposed to de-mythologize the mob, too, but we all wanted to be gangsters after we saw it, right?”
for real tho Russell Crowe as Gus, Dennis Quaid as Call, Jack Quaid as Newt, Chris Evans as Jake Spoon, Elle Fanning as Lorena, Phil Lamarr as Josh Deets, Josh O'Connor as July Johnson
this was so wonderful and so fun. i will happily participate in a book club every time you choose to run one! i was so in love with lonesome dove (still am) that i convinced my sister to read it and passed along my copy. your influence!! mcmurtry may forever in my heart…
i am late to the party because of the beautiful chicago public library which is now completely moot because i am buying this book... i read for so many hours today and burst into big boohoo tears (newt core) when i got a call immediately upon finishing and then had to explain that i was crying because i finished lonesome dove. i am so so grateful to get to read these posts, everyone is so smart. i feel insane! yay!
There’s a passage close to the one you cited near the end of the book, Newt’s response to Call’s departure, that I’ve revisited countless times, and never fails to make me misty eyed:
“Looking at the Captain, Newt began to feel sadder than he had ever felt in his life. Just go on, he wanted to say. Go on, if it’s that hard. He felt too young; he didn’t want to be left with it all. He felt he couldn’t bear what was happening, it was so surprising.”
I read this for the first time last fall and fell in love with it, revisiting it for this book club has so fun. Your observations and insights got at the heart of what I loved about McMurty’s writing. Thank you Fran Mag :)
Streets of Laredo next time…?
Streets of Laredo would be so fun!!! Did you read all the others in this series when you first read LD or just stick with that one? Either way, thank you for revising with us.
I’m skeptical of the rest of the books in the series, because coming out of LD and diving into Streets there’s a real sense of tension in that nobody is off limits and anyone could drop dead at any time, so the other entries being prequels strikes me as sort of weightless. Then again I’d probably eat that shit up, who am I kidding. I’m sure they’re pretty good!
"Pretty good" is exactly how I'd describe them. I'd rank them as follows: LD >>>> Streets of Laredo > Comanche Moon >> Dead Man's Walk
a Defector commenter recommends reading Dead Man's Walk, then Comanche Moon, then concluding with Streets. I'm curious!
I just read them in order of when they were written, but reading them chronologically could work too! Idk about you but after finishing LD I couldn't resist reading what happens next to our (remaining) heroes, so it was pretty easy for me to pick up SoL.
I cried too much on Sunday between watching The Heiress and finishing this book. In both cases I assumed it would be no big deal because I had seen/read these works before. Turns out like Newt I had more tears in me than I expected.
The last sentence of this book is insane. It’s already so bleak and it ends on a note of gothic despair. I believe the miniseries ended on Call and the journalist instead, because it’s just too haunting as a wrap up to this big saga. A lot of Westerns end with gunslinger figures who are kept out of the civilization they helped to create and preserve. McMurtry takes it a step further by sending Call home to a ruin.
McMurtry is an interesting revisionist. He gets close to making a kind of feminist critique of the West that could be too simplistic — Clara as a more well rounded matriarchal figure who offers community and safety in opposition to the violence the Hat Creek boys meet. But Clara is not capable of making a better world on her own. She needs help too, in the imperfect form of a few lovesick cowboys who stick around.
Call’s character comes to the fore in the last section, revealed arguably as the villain of the story — Gus without his charm and generosity. His name suggests a call to adventure, and McMurtry is not so hot on the idea of adventure. I tried doing a fantasy cast of Lonesome Dove with classic Western actors (didn’t get much further than a mustacheless Howard Keel as Jake Spoon), and I think both Call and Gus could have been Wayne in different modes — the more relaxed Wayne of Rio Bravo or the terrifying Wayne of The Searchers. Anyone who enjoyed Lonesome Dove and is interested in more Western movies might check out one of his best performances in Red River, another cattle drive epic about fathers and sons.
I love Pea Eye not getting the Newt-Call connection all the way to the end. I feel for him. I’ve never been much of a noticer.
I was compelled by Blythe's description of Clara as a "talking dog" in one of the prequels - what comes off as charming, world weariness here is kind of (for lack of better term) Mary Sueish earlier on, a woman who can do everything and calls it like it is.
I admire the randomness of Dish and Pea Eye's journeys - guys who are there and sometime useful and mostly stupid, who were granted the blessing of survival by just being lucky, right place right time. Many of their more (and less) competent peers can't say similarly.
End of the book really stunned me - real, like, flipping the page to see if something was missing. I'd not had this since the very excellent ending of Ferrante's Lying Lives of Adults and honestly Birnam Wood. No one knows how to end a book anymore, etc.
Call's journey home, or at least back, to find ruins, reminded me of the last section of Lord of the Rings that was excised from the film adaptations: Frodo and the hobbits return to their beloved shire only to find that the evil they were fighting has come home.
Interesting you say this because the original idea for Lonesome Dove was a screenplay (co-written with Peter Bogdanovic) with Wayne signed on to play Call (plus Jimmy Stewart as Gus and Henry Fonda as Jake Spoon).
I have heard this and it seems kinda hack imo. We already got Liberty Valance with those same actors!!
Something incredibly small and dumb I kinda liked in this last chunk was the use of the word “rude” for “crude.” Like a rude shovel. Gonna incorporate this into my daily lingo for a while and see how it goes.
Anyway, haven’t stopped thinking about it since I finished last Friday. Clara’s final speech to Call? I cried. Big Xavier Wanz coming back to literally burn the house down on the last page? Damn. Also, while Pea Eye has been a good hang through much of the book, I noted weeks ago when I was looking up all the adaptations that Sam Shepard plays him in Streets of Laredo, so I knew he had to get up to something pretty special eventually. Dude walks a hundred miles naked through the snow with only Deets’s ghost looking out for him. Great stuff.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what duty means in this book, duty as a kind of bulletproof (except sometimes literally the opposite) vest that can shield you from intimacy and compassion. I think k that’s what makes the last stretch of the book so moving to me, the tragedy of this man who’s destroyed his own life and so many others all in the service of duty. And, in the end, he’s doomed to walk through a kind of lonely hell, severed from his son, most of his other few friends and loved ones dead. It’s a terribly bleak ending, but a brilliant one.
I already miss this book, but I also don’t know that I’m ready to go back in with one of the prequels or the sequel for a minute. I do think I might check out one of McMurtry’s sad guys and gals in Texas/New Mexico/LA books though. What an incredible month of reading!
omg Sam Shepard as Pea Eye is crazy... I love that
What's especially compelling to me about Call's sense of duty is that we're not ever witness to the origin / heyday of when this might have made him useful. He has sparks of brilliance in the book - but mostly his adherence to duty is destructive.
Highly rec Last Picture Show in terms of other McMurtry!
been thinking about Wanz' self-destruction a lot...a parallel to Call's refusal to stay in Montana and claim Newt? a metaphor for the ecological destruction wrought by colonization and cattle farming?
Dish Boggett hate thread not withstanding, I really loved this book and never would've read it otherwise. Thank you, Fran!!! Now that my vitriol is out of my system I will briefly praise the ending.
I was keeping an eye on Old Dog to see when he would eventually, symbolically die, and I thought that the bull vs bear showdown was sort of our replacement for that, but I was very interested to see that Old Dog did get to go out, and it was not with a bang but a whimper. He doesn't get killed, officially, he just kind of straggles towards the bag, lagging farther and farther until eventually, people realize he's probably been missing a couple of days, and is already dead. Nothing could be a better metaphor for the "extinction" Fran focused on, in my eyes. It's not something that happens in a single moment, but slowly, pointlessly, and hopelessly, as one by one men are picked off by the elements or their own foolishness, or just the times. The final scene, and final words, were shocking and painful, and in addition to piling one last serving of futility on Call, I think do Lorena a lot of respect, and acknowledge her rightful place in the center of this story.
P.S. it is so harsh that they ate the pigs :( It felt like they were finalizing Gus' death in a way. He may live on in their memories, kind of, but not to the extent that they need to actually honor his wishes (except Call who kind of needs an excuse to run away anyway). Life goes on and somebody's gotta get eaten.
I was kinda SHOCKED they ate the pigs like - those guys endured so much! They're braver than Newt!!!!
McMurty makes like, a crack about it at the end of the passage. Like, "Sucks!" The man is so cold lmao
There’s something about that in the preface, too - “And the blue pigs walked all the way to Montana just to be eaten. Life ain’t for sissies, as Augustus might have said.” Well damn, Larry
Yes that is the line I was thinking of! Talk about harsh
I do think this is the kind of book that you’ll always been aware of who you were and how you were living when you read it. In many ways, that is, for me, one of the chief appeals of The Big Book; whether it takes you a week or a month or a season to read it, there’s sort of an inevitable absorption of the characters and story into your own history because of its sheer volume. I haven’t read Lonesome Dove since 2011, so some of the details have been lost to me (and fun to revisit in these posts), but what feels most memorable was the experience of reading it—where I was at the time, how the characters spoke to me, what that chapter of my life felt like (mostly bad; I worked at a theme park). I’ve been contemplating a reread this summer, but 2nd volume of In Search of Lost Time may get me first…
This is sort of how I feel about Moby-Dick, which comes up every time there's an option for new book club, but that book is SO connected to early 2020 to me (and finished in the spring of that year after... well, school was done) that returning to it now would just feel not quite right. I think my life would have to be a little more different to appreciate it on a new level once again. Did you do any sequels/prequels or just LD?
Very much my experience with Moby-Dick—read it my first summer in NY when I was 23, broke, and going insane experiencing NY summer and it’s attending humidity for the first time. Sort of can’t imagine a better circumstance to encounter the first page of that book, and then, you know, the rest of it.
I haven’t read any of the other LD books! Only other McMurtry I’ve read is Last Picture Show, which is a slim volume and also sad as hell.
The other Western guy I love is Oakley Hall—I’m always banging the drum for Warlock, which I think is a masterpiece, but The Bad Lands is also really good.
I can’t express how happy it makes me to see another person referencing Warlock.
Jasper Fant MENTIONED, that's my boy
if my name was Jasper Fant.... what i wouldn't give...
TY Fran for yet another smashing book club! Dare I say the best book you’ve covered yet???
I think most (good) long books get at least a little boost from feeling like something of significance has been gathered over the journey of reading them, which makes it fitting that this one is literally about a journey. It kind of has to be this long so we can feel the miles, but because we have such richly drawn characters to spend them with and such plainly beautiful prose to hear about them by, the experience never feels like time being wasted but simply spent, and spent well.
It’s all so cohesive that I don’t have any dramatic new takeaways from the ending, but a few highlights:
- Call’s worldview getting pincer movement’d by Gus and Clara:
- Gus: “He turned his back on it, and now he ain’t about to admit that he made the wrong choice. He’d as soon kill himself. He’s got to keep trying to be the way he thinks he is, and he’s got to make out that he was always that way—it’s why he ain’t owned up to being your pa.”
- Clara: “He had gone through life feeling that he had known what should be done, and now a woman flung it at him that he hadn’t.”
- Also, Call “choking on himself. He felt he had failed in all he had tried to be: the good boy standing there was evidence of it.”
- Everything about Gus’s death is so touching, but especially his entire prolonged exchange with Call and his freak being matched exactly by Dr. Mobley
- The moving image of Clara “coming back to enjoyment” after Bob’s death, marked by her eating cake with relish
- Something very darkly funny about the whole Blue Duck finale — reminded me of Magnolia’s prologue. Plus it gives us this ICON: “‘You going?’ ‘No,’ Goodnight said. ‘I don’t attend hangings, although I’ve presided over some, of the homegrown sort. This is the longest conversation I’ve had in ten years. Goodbye.’”
- Using the sign as Gus’s grave marker… the names fade, but Hat Creek Cattle Company is forever </3
"This is the longest conversation I’ve had in ten years. Goodbye." might have been the ONLY thing I knew about this book and it did not disappoint.
The Blue Duck finale is so thrilling and strange as to become funny, in a sense - I still don't really completely get what McMurtry is doing with this character, but the whirlwind of his death, and how odd it is, lingers as a gesture towards the unknowable.
That's a great way of putting it! For all the finite points he puts on many of these characters' lives, it's definitely the ellipses that will stick with me
EVIDENCE FOR DISH BOGGETT DEATH SENTENCE:
1. "The men wondered about Lorena. What had happened to her? What did she look like now? ... Dish, especially, could not keep his eyes off the little tent. He longed for a glimpse of her and kept imagining that any minute she would step out of the tent and look his way. Surely she remembered him; perhaps she would even wave, and call him over." (491). Sir, I'm sorry - did you just say, about the woman with whom you are not on speaking terms, after she has been rescued from kidnapping and brutal abuse 'maybe not that she's back, she'll wave at me' ????? WHAT? THE? FUCK? How self centered could you possibly be!!! This is one of the least compassionate lines in this book and it. made me so angry I genuinely had to stop reading for a bit.
2. " 'Did you get to see Lorie?' Dish asked point-blank... 'I seen her, she was drinking coffee,' Newt said. 'Yes, she always took coffee in the morning,' Lippy said, demonstrating a fmiliarity with Lorena's habits that offended Dish at once. 'Yes, and I'm sure you spied on her every opportunity you got," he said hotly... 'Dish don't allow low types like us the right to even to look at the girl.' ... It rankled [Dish] continually that Gus had all of Lorena's company, day after day." (547). This is a psychotic level of posessiveness. It frightens me. If I had a friend whose boyfriend spoke of them this way, let alone a random acquaintance of theirs who wouldn't stop staring at them from across the horse camp, I would tell them to sleep at my house.
3. "[Lorena] was so glad she wanted to run out to [Gus], but Dish Boggett was nearby, trimming his horse's feet, so she kept still. 'She's just fine, Gus,' Dish said, when Gus dismounted. 'I looked after her as best I could.' 'I'm much obliged,' Augustus said. 'She won't hardly even look at me, Dish said. He said it mildly, but he didn't feel it mildly. Lorena's indifference pained him more than anything he had ever experienced." (627). Shut the fuck up Dish. Really, more than anything you've ever experienced? You don't know her. Keep her name out of your mouth you JERK why should she look at you.
4. "Dish Boggett took no part in the conversation. He felt sad about Gus. He remembered that Gus had once lent him money to visit Lorena, and this memory lent another tone to his sadness... In his sadness came a hope that when the drive was over he could draw his wages and go back and win Lorena, after all... How he had envied Gus, for Lorena would smile at Gus, but she had never smiled at him. Now Gus was dead, and Dish determined to mention to the Captain that he wanted to draw his wages and leave as soon as the drive was finished." (806). Now this is just too much. Obviously I expected nothing less but it is still absolutely horrifying to read. The level of self-absorption here is off the charts there's really nothing to even say.
5. McMurtry knows he sucks because he named him Dishwater.
I hope the jury will find Dish Boggett guilty of being the worst guy ever and give a unanimous sentence to hanging. Far less deserving people have been hanged already.
Not this............
Dish innocent! The guy's got a crush! And is kinda stupid!
Aside from Gus' extended death, I was disappointed by the book's ending and also thought I must have missed a chapter. But life isn't always tied up in pretty bows - it just moves on, and we better follow, or we will be trampled by some wayward cows or even buffalo. I always identified more with Call than Gus and was glad to see him take the lead toward the end of the book. While not necessarily complimentary, McMurtry stayed true to the character. It would have made sense for Gus to be buried at Clara's (as no-nonsense Clara suggested), but Call is single-minded in honoring his promise to Gus. He also needed to escape back to Texas where he belonged.
Thanks to Blythe for sharing how Lonesome Dove transformed her. Since I read this when I was 25, LD did not transform me per se but it did shape me into the person I am today. I learned a great deal about growing up from these characters, not only Call and Gus, but from the whole gang, especially my favorites: Clara, Newt, July, Deets, Roscoe, and Po Campo.
The long NYRB piece talks about how most McMurtry endings feel a little off, both to teach you a lesson for expecting something more concrete and perhaps because it's truer to his artistic vision of how the world works.
As far as Westerns go I've really only read recent revisionist versions: All the Pretty Horses a few summers ago, and now this. my closest comparisons for Lonesome Dove are epics in other genres, like The Stand or Lord of the Rings as I alluded to elsewhere. (I am soooo bad at geography, this book needs a map up front a la Middle-earth.)
I agree with one of our compatriots (Sam E iirc) that Blue Duck's lack of interiority is a glaring flaw. I'm not against depictions of real human Evil (I love David Lynch after all) but considering McMurtry's considerable strength for character development it's a shame that this fascinating and terrifying Native character isn't given more depth.
I do hope July and Clara hook up. If Gus + Lorena's May-December thing couldn't last, maybe they can make it work.
Call, what a sonuvabitch. I was so sad for Newt yet proud of him for this: "“No, I ain’t kin to nobody in this world,” Newt said bitterly. “I don’t want to be. I won’t be.”" Elmira at least had the conviction to ditch the kids she didn't want; Call lacks even that and can only express any paternal affection through violence and the gifts he offers as a goodbye.
what a book. very tempted to re-read the first few chapters just to enjoy the gang hanging out again, before they run into all that death.
I had the same thought about revisiting the start, just to get one last look at them (Bradley Cooper voice)
Blue Duck is a POV character in Comanche Moon if that interests you!
Still processing the end (Call why you gotta leave Newt like that 😭) but want the record to show that I finished the other two Fran Magazine Mays in July and here I am today. Also killer last scene back in LD
HELL YESSSSSS speedy reading / honestly maybe our best book yet / I can't get over how this book ends
great quote from the NYer's McMurtry obit: Don Graham, a professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin: “‘The Godfather’ was supposed to de-mythologize the mob, too, but we all wanted to be gangsters after we saw it, right?”
Okay this is the official casting thread for the Fran Maganize produced remake of Lonesome Dove. Hit me with your ideal casting choices
Carrie Coon CLARA
Ed Harris as Call
Don Johnson as Gus
this + coon is *elite* casting. Cuba Gooding Jr. as Deets maybe? would be cool to see him tackle something real again.
Clarke Peters
How about the entire cast of Stranger Things? Below are my suggestions, but I think they could easily switch roles.
Sadie Sink - Lorena
Noah Schnapp - Newt
Gaten Matarazzo - Pea Eye
Finn Wolfhard - Dish
Joe Keery - July
David Harbour - Call
Winona Ryder - Clara
Millie Bobby Brown - Elmira
Matthew Modine - Gus
Brett Gelman - Blue Duck
Caleb McLaughlin - Deets
Maya Hawke - Janey
U are a madman for this one
Gelman as the murdering psycho tho...
If the shoe fits
I forgot Joseph Quinn as Jake Spoon.
John Goodman is Lippy
Andre Holland is Josh Deets
Skyler Gisondo is Newt
Hailee Steinfeld as Lorena!!!!
I consistently pictured Gus as Ernest Borgnine??
for real tho Russell Crowe as Gus, Dennis Quaid as Call, Jack Quaid as Newt, Chris Evans as Jake Spoon, Elle Fanning as Lorena, Phil Lamarr as Josh Deets, Josh O'Connor as July Johnson
dying at Quaid pairing
I'm mad at Chris Evans - a perfect Jake Spoon
Chris Evans has the rizz to show how Lorena could fall for a Hall of Shame level Sucker and Buster.
this was so wonderful and so fun. i will happily participate in a book club every time you choose to run one! i was so in love with lonesome dove (still am) that i convinced my sister to read it and passed along my copy. your influence!! mcmurtry may forever in my heart…
omg yay... I should foist in on my brother when I see him next week...
i am late to the party because of the beautiful chicago public library which is now completely moot because i am buying this book... i read for so many hours today and burst into big boohoo tears (newt core) when i got a call immediately upon finishing and then had to explain that i was crying because i finished lonesome dove. i am so so grateful to get to read these posts, everyone is so smart. i feel insane! yay!