Written by Mac Sandlin
“The earth is mostly just a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight.” That isn’t the best quote from Larry McMurtry’s 1986 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, “Lonesome Dove,” but it’s close. The best quote is probably “Life is San Francisco is still just life,” or maybe “The hardest thing in life is choosin’ what matters.” But there are a dozen others that one could argue for just as well. The book, and the miniseries based on it (starring Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall) is worth checking out just for the quotes. I was reminded of that this week because I’d recommended the book to Dana Steil, and he commented on how many great lines there were in it. I am also reminded of it most every week because Kraig Martin peppers so much of his conversations with quotes from it.
I grew up with “Lonesome Dove.” Momma and Daddy and my cousins all loved it, so I watched it in junior high, but I didn’t read the book until college. I can remember sitting in my class on Acts sophomore year and reading with the book in my lap while my professor, who deserved more respect and attention than I was giving at the time, lectured about Paul. At a particularly heart-wrenching scene in the book, I felt my eyes fill with tears and I had the very awkward experience of pretending to be so moved by the professor’s comments on the third missionary journey that I began to cry. I remember wondering if he bought it and whether it was a hellable offense to attempt to deceive a decent and godly a man as Owen Olbricht. I regret not paying attention in class, but I’ll never regret reading that book.
“Lonesome Dove” is almost certainly the greatest western ever written. It has all the elements of that most American of American genres, but it challenges the standard tropes of the West at every stage of the story. McMurtry wanted to write a western novel that didn’t romanticize the West, but the trouble was that McMurtry was a Texan and an honest writer. It turns out the West is romantic and nobody who tells the truth about it can avoid that fact. McMurty seemed sort of bitter about that and couldn’t ever bring himself to admit it even though the popularity of his story proved it to be so. The cowboy is the great American mythic figure, and so “Lonesome Dove” ends up performing the epic grandeur and poetry of a cattle drive despite its author’s best efforts to avoid it. The almost, but not quite, cynical worldview of the book serves only to make its deeply admirable characters all the more appealing because of their rough exterior and unacknowledged scars. Besides being deep and wise, and extraordinarily well written, “Lonesome Dove” is also a thrilling adventure story and hilariously funny, that oh so rare of stories that manages to make us laugh, cry, think and grow. So find some time this semester to read the book. Take a weekend and binge the miniseries. And don’t let the fact that it’s from the ‘80s slow you down any. Like Gus would say, “The older the violin, the sweeter the music.”
