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emgoboingo 's review for:
Lonesome Dove
by Larry McMurtry
This is the rare book that manages to be both problematic and readable. How to rate something like this--that builds off a white frontier fantasy of courageous, but troubled cowboys and literal damsels in distress. The depiction of Native Americans is one of either grotesque violence or that of an infantilized people on the verge of starvation. There is some questioning of past violence towards Native Americans, but it doesn't prevent further violence, nor the glorification of that violence. The depictions of Black people and women are only a little better. This is not historical--it's a delusion. And yet, very hard to put down. And from a writing perspective, this is not perfect either--with some laughable morality and plot points (looking at you, grizzly bear fight). If you want a binge-worthy and long "great American novel", this offers a version of that--but hold it at a distance and fact check along the way. Case in point: there is much talk amongst the white characters in this book about the possibility of being scalped by Native Americans, and several scenes in the book perpetuate that myth. But much of the scalping during the colonization of the US was done by white settlers against Native peoples at the behest of governments and private individuals--some with bounties of land and money in exchange for Native American scalps. It's a brutal history that is not widely known and books like Lonesome Dove further obscure the facts of genocidal violence in the American West. https://theconversation.com/indigenous-peoples-day-offers-a-reminder-of-native-american-history-including-the-scalping-they-endured-at-the-hands-of-colonists-214433