Take a photo of a barcode or cover
mattroche 's review for:
Lonesome Dove
by Larry McMurtry
I was taken aback when I started reading this cinderblock of a novel. If some novels start with a bang, this one leaps from the starting blocks with all the momentum of a feather in zero gravity.
Turns out "Lonesome Dove (the setting for the first scenes of the novel) is just about the most depressing crater of a no-future settlement you can imagine, and the cast of characters inspires, well, not much.
This is a subversive novel. Mostly. Yes, it has superhero Rangers who dive their horses into a band of Indians leaving a wake of bodies. And yes there are cattle crossings and brandings and so so so much whoring.
But it is remarkable how much character development that McMurtry can squeeze into a group of profoundly emotionally stunted men and hopeless women. It seems that the American frontier was not the last bastion of true freedom but a libertarian hellscape of unregulated Old Testament psychopathy.
These aren't Men. They are confused arrangements of matter, loosely bound by a combination of misplaced values, imperfect codes of behavior, and aborted socialization. Unaccommodated man is not a "poor, bare, forked animal," he is a selfish, violent, and more than a little sad.
I didn't know what to expect, but I was engrossed by the characters. I didn't give a rat for the plot - a mock-Homeric journey filled with just enough trials to keep the plot moving. I cared about how the characters were drawn. Gus and Call are truly magnificently flawed. Just terribly broken people that you stick with and root for because they are grand and perfect.
There is enough of the romantic American West here to spark that "oh to be alive when men were men" feeling, and it is marvelously tempered by precise depictions of men who really, and sadly, are just men.
And the women they, and the landscape, destroy.
Turns out "Lonesome Dove (the setting for the first scenes of the novel) is just about the most depressing crater of a no-future settlement you can imagine, and the cast of characters inspires, well, not much.
This is a subversive novel. Mostly. Yes, it has superhero Rangers who dive their horses into a band of Indians leaving a wake of bodies. And yes there are cattle crossings and brandings and so so so much whoring.
But it is remarkable how much character development that McMurtry can squeeze into a group of profoundly emotionally stunted men and hopeless women. It seems that the American frontier was not the last bastion of true freedom but a libertarian hellscape of unregulated Old Testament psychopathy.
These aren't Men. They are confused arrangements of matter, loosely bound by a combination of misplaced values, imperfect codes of behavior, and aborted socialization. Unaccommodated man is not a "poor, bare, forked animal," he is a selfish, violent, and more than a little sad.
I didn't know what to expect, but I was engrossed by the characters. I didn't give a rat for the plot - a mock-Homeric journey filled with just enough trials to keep the plot moving. I cared about how the characters were drawn. Gus and Call are truly magnificently flawed. Just terribly broken people that you stick with and root for because they are grand and perfect.
There is enough of the romantic American West here to spark that "oh to be alive when men were men" feeling, and it is marvelously tempered by precise depictions of men who really, and sadly, are just men.
And the women they, and the landscape, destroy.