The Great (Western) American Novel

Summers are for digging into big, difficult, soul-satisfying novels I’ve been meaning to read for years. I think this desire for me is left over from the summer required reading I had to do for English honors classes in high school, when I sat under shade trees reading Dostoevsky and Kate Chopin in the mornings before schlepping off to my afternoon and evening food service jobs.

This year that book was Lonesome Dove. I’ve never explored the Western genre, and from everything I’d deduced from people online, this Larry McMurty masterpiece was the place to start. I had a more personal reason for wanting to read this book. A friend from high school, who passed away a number of years ago, had counted this as his all-time favorite novel, a book he reread every year, and named Augustus McCrae as his favorite character. When I helped his wife write his obituary, we even repurposed the epitaph for one of the book’s best characters, Deets, to describe my friend: Cheerful in all weathers. Never shirked a task. Splendid behavior.

Lots of beans, and so much more

Going into the reading, I gave myself some grace. The book is a thousand pages long. Reviewers complain online that it starts slowly, with a lot of descriptions of people eating beans. I’ve taken on long, difficult classics before where I’ve had to start and stop a bit to get through them, and expected Lonesome Dove to present a similar challenge. I expected to be reading multiple books simultaneously as a waded my way through this tome.

The reality could not have been more different, and this, as an aspiring fiction writer myself, is what fascinates me so much about this novel and its author. I could not put Lonesome Dove down. It is true that the book is long, complex, and slow-moving. The plot, when summarized simply, does not seem like it would offer an exciting read. Over a thousand pages and a hundred chapters, a bunch of cowboys start out stuck in a dry, hot, boring place where they’ve been for years. Then they decide to go north from Texas and Montana, and they do that, day after excruciating day, through terrible weather, dangers from bandits and Indians, loneliness, filth, dust, boredom.

It sounds like a slog, right? Except, it isn’t. McMurty craftily wove together multiple storylines, dozens and dozens of fascinating characters, varying timelines, brilliant dialogue, and masterful storytelling to create a novel I had a hard time putting down. (Because I prefer reading paperbacks instead of ebooks, I opted to leave the book behind during a week-long vacation because of its heft, and I missed it.) It genuinely is a Great American Novel.

Perfection is Larry McMurty sentence

As a writer, the most fascinating quality of this book is its deceptive simplicity. McMurty’s writing is sophisticated yet effortless. Nothing about this prose is overwritten. His sentences are impeccably crafted, with just enough description to help you see, smell, hear, and sense exactly where and who the characters are, and no more. You just have to open the book to a random page to find one of these gorgeous paragraphs:

The border nights had qualities that he had come to admire, different as they were from the qualities of nights in Tennessee. In Tennessee, as he remembered, nights tended to get mushy, with a cottony mist drifting into the hollows. Border nights were so dry you could smell the dirt, and clear as dew. In fact, the nights were so clear it was tricky; even with hardly any moon the stars were bright enough that every bush and fence post cast a shadow. Pea Eye, who had a jumpy disposition, was always shying from shadows, and he had even blazed away at innocent chaparral bushes on occasion, mistaking them for bandits.

Those few sentences, economical and careful yet so simple-seeming, paint such a perfect feeling and scene that it almost makes me cry. How, oh how, does someone write sentences like that, let along an entire thousand-page book full of them!

The simple complexity of Gus McCrae

McMurty’s characters in this book were also brilliant, but none as iconic as my friend’s hero, Gus McCrae. He is a quintessential American hero, imperfect in his habits but flawless in his character. He drinks, he’s lazy, he shirks hard labor in favor of card games and prostitutes. But he’s an endlessly loyal friend, even more loyal in love, and he’s true to his principles and his belief in justice and fairness that has driven him throughout his life.

His decision later in the book to hang an old friend and colleague who has witlessly become an accessory to crimes paints this picture perfectly: though he’s torn up about it, he never hesitates to carry out his duty. Nor does he ever flinch at pursuing, rescuing, protecting, and taking care of Lorena, in spite of his conflicting feelings for another woman and Lorie’s own dismissive behavior toward him in the past.

My prevailing emotions when I finished this book were regret that it was over (I could have read another thousand pages of this story), gratitude that I’d discovered this book in the world, thanks mostly to my friend, and awe at McMurty’s (underrated) literary genius. As I struggle write my own sentences, I hold this work up as an example of how to keep polishing and whittling toward elegant simplicity.