Lonesome Dove

I've owed this blog a review of Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove for God knows how long now. But it's never been that far in the back of my mind. And it's been even more front and center there recently. The problem is that it's such an epic, long novel that to do it justice in a review seems kinda daunting, especially after so much time has passed. So I think what I'll do is review the book in piecemeal fashion: a bit here, a bit there, until I get what I want to say out there. Let me start with a couple of general observations that I've made before about the book, and then I'll do a kind of character assessment. First, the novel is extremely well-written. The narrative style is engaging, witty, and very coherent. It is sophisticated and, at times, actually masterful. The dialogue is especially noteworthy for its ability to capture the kind of slang and speaking mannerisms of the 19th Century western United States. I promise you that if you pick up this 800-900 page book and don't let the length of it deter you from starting it, you'll find that it reads easily and that the length of it becomes less daunting over time.

I've said this before and I'll repeat it again here: it is an epic story where the characters, their personalities, and their relationships are much more central than the actual storyline itself. Essentially the storyline is simple: it's about a cattle drive from South Texas to Montana. But my criticism is not so much that the plot is very basic, and that the focus is on the characters; but rather that the plot is contained exclusively by the characters. What do I mean by that? I mean, essentially, that if you read this book, you'll come to think that the only people who constituted this vast expanse of territory were the 25-30 folks who make up the various characters introduced in the story. There is not a single character that we are introduced to with some measure of development that isn't just some passing personality in the whole epic story. This just seems incredulous to me, especially in an epic story. I mean, really, there must have been plenty of side stories and marginal personalities that flitted in and out of this epic story, and surely some of them were probably important for brief flashes in the story timeline. But we just don't hear much about them. Even the cattle driver who shows up at the Hat Creek Ranch at the beginning of the story factors into the story in a significant way later. The actual reality of the epic of human existence is that some people enter into narrative story arcs, have important roles to play for brief periods of time, and then just disappear into the unknown afterwards, never to be heard from again. But in Lonesome Dove, you hardly ever get this picture of reality. There is not a single character that I can think of that you are introduced to in the story who isn't, at some point, of vital importance to the storyline. And that the characters we meet are all neatly threaded together in ways that simply defy one's sense of what the real course of human interaction is like. How likely is it, for instance, that July Johnson will hunt for Jake Spoon, then give up the hunt for Spoon to go after his pathetic wife, but bumping into Gus McCrae along the way, only to find himself making his way to Clara's ranch (Clara, of course, is the erstwhile love of of Gus McCrae's life) and becoming one of her ranch-hands, where his pregnant, fleeing wife just happens to have also landed and given birth to his son. I mean, come on!! That never happens in real life. It's all so tidy and neat! Anyway, that's my major criticism of the narrative style. It's just too impossible and unbelievable. That said, it's still a riveting read.

But what I'd like to do, since the novel is character-centri, is to focus on individual character profiles and to review them a bit. To give my thoughts on what each character means and symbolizes to me. And I'll start with Jake Spoon.

He has to be one of the most tragic and pathetic characters in the whole novel. The genius of McMurtry's creation of Spoon is that you never can reconcile yourself to the character. You can never really decide if you like the man or if you despise him, if you feel sorry for him or if you think he's a heel who got what he deserved. What you do get with the Spoon character is a strong sense of the real tragedy of human existence. He is a character who is charming, talented, and full of potential, only to be brought down by his human weakness. His vanity, his pride, his loneliness drives him into situations that he simply can't escape from and which ultimately become his undoing. The fact that he ended up being hanged for cattle and horse thieving by his lifelong friends Gus and Call was surprising to me. That kind of indiscriminate justice, without due process of trial and judgment according to constitutional rights, seems so foreign and merciless; and yet we know that Gus and Call are reasonable and merciful people. It just didn't square with modern sensibilities. I suppose McMurtry did capture here a lost sense of justice that pervaded the wild west of 19th Century America. It was a time of different moral codes and different ideas of constitutional rights. But, back to Spoon ...

You always want to like the man, but just can never bring yourself to do so, even though you know that his luck is always so damn rotten. And yet, in spite of the fact that he faces lots of bad luck that is not of his own making, there is a lot of bad luck he encounters that comes of his poor decisions, too. And here is another element of the tragedy of his character. His undeserved misfortune degrades his mental state such that he gets down on himself and gets depressed. And then it is this self-loathing and depression that leads him to consciously make bad decisions and choices that also contribute to his bad luck. You get the sense that he is one of those people whose fate has been predetermined to always be bad and that he is just condemned to a miserable life. No matter how much he tries to fight against his fate, it's almost just pointless. And this is where the reader feels a bit of empathy for the character. There is an unfairness about his life that almost approaches injustice; and it's hard for a reader to therefore condemn Spoon for anything about the bad things that he does or gets caught up in. In short, Spoon is the classic tragic figure in the story whose life ends without any sense of redemption. We can contrast Spoon with July Johnson, who is another tragic character, but one whose inherent goodness brings his tragic reality to a point of redemption. More on July Johnson later. For now, I'll just end it here with this little evaluation of Jake Spoon. If you've read the book, I welcome your comments.