How Lonesome Dove Rekindled My Love for Storytelling
How Lonesome Dove Rekindled My Love for Storytelling
I picked up Lonesome Dove after reading a New York Times Book Review on the newly published Larry McMurtry biography by Tracy Daughtery.
McMurtry died on March 25, 2021, at eighty-four years old. One of the reviewer’s comments from the biography’s introduction captured me. It said Larry McMurtry was a writer in the truest sense. You can be sure he would be writing if he had any free time in his daily life. Writing was his default. Writing was his joy. He was a storyteller who told his stories by writing them down.
This review spoke of his first and most famous book, Lonesome Dove, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1986. He also wrote The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment.
Despite McMurtry’s accolades, I didn’t start reading Lonesome Dove. I hesitated because of its sheer size. The Kindle version has 946 pages. I rarely stay interested in a book for that long. Then I read that McMurtry grew up in south Texas near the Mexico border, which gave him cowboy cred.
I decided to go for it. I downloaded it to my Kindle and told Kathy. She said, “I read that book over forty years ago. I loved it. I want to reread it. We can talk about it.” Now I was all in.
This book moves at the pace of a cattle drive. A cattle drive that lasts three thousand miles. Now, you might think that sounds boring. The truth is, the characters are so good, and the situations they get into are so interesting I didn’t want the cattle drive to end. I just wanted to continue being with these men and women.
When one of my favorite characters died unexpectedly, I mourned him. I was sad that whole day despite being on a Caribbean cruise. That’s how real these people, these fictional characters, were to me.
I found myself continually asking the question, “How can this author know people so well?”
Here are a few quotes on the author’s insights into people.
“I figured out something, Lorie,” he said. “I figured out why you and me get along so well. You know more than you say, and I say more than I know. That means we’re a perfect match as long as we don’t hang around one another more than an hour at a stretch.”
“If we shoot him, we’ll have Gus for a cook,” Call said. “In that case, we’ll have to eat, talk, or else starve to death listening.”
He did not like travel—the thought of it made him unhappy. And yet, when he went home to Mexico, he felt unhappy too, for his wife was disappointed in him and let him know it every day. He had never been sure what she wanted—after all, their children were beautiful—but whatever it was, he had not been able to give it to her. His daughters were his delight, but they would soon all marry and be gone, leaving him no protection from his wife.
A sentence like this...
“He grew lonely and could not remember who he had been.”
I was always drawn to the romance of the cowboy way. It was a simpler time in our country’s history. It was a time of clear right and wrong, quick justice, survival, and the search for a better life.
Lonesome Dove captures the spirit of this history.
It is the best fiction book I ever read. I highly recommend it. The time you spend will be entertaining. And in the end, you’ll have met and spent time with some great cowboys.
Have you ever been so deeply connected to a book? If so, which one? Comment on LinkedIn.