Cowboys and Indians

I first encountered Larry McMurtry when the old man made his way across the stage, sporting a tux with a Bolo tie, to accept his Oscar for his work on the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain. In his short speech, he thanked not his family or his friends, or God -- but his typewriter. "I couldn't have done it without you," he said. I liked him immediately.

A few weeks ago, coming off a good but claustrophobic and navel-gazey John Updike novel, I wanted something sprawling and airy, and I remembered McMurtry. I'd never read anything about the Old West before, but that seemed just the medicine. I picked the most popular of his books, the one that earned him his Pulitzer.

My first impression of Lonesome Dove was that the writing was overly simple. The vocabulary is no more than a fourth-grade level, and it tended to point out the obvious. On top of that, it was too like Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman -- a little mushy and mainstream. But the Pulitzer Prize logo on the cover made me keep pushing through the 1,000 page novel.

Now, by page 900, one thing is clear: Larry McMurtry is a genius. The Doctor Quinn tone was a tease, and I'm sure he did it on purpose. When characters start getting their balls cut off and shoved down their throats, and burned, and drowned, it's all the more shocking.

There are few stand-out passages in the book, which actually makes the book itself feel more memorable and solid. Rather than catching certain things in your memory, the consistency lets the whole thing build and accumulate in your brain. It never hits you over the head with its greatness -- but at some point (for me it was around page 600), you out-of-the-blue realize that it's been amazing. Then you worry about it being over too soon.

I'm enchanted with the world of the Old West, it turns out. My sense of fantasy has always been rooted in sci-fi and super-heroes. Gun-slinging cowboys and saloons and Indians and the Great Plains seem like a new invention to me. And Lonesome Dove is one of those books you read for the world it presents as much as for the characters, similar to Lord of the Rings. Given the level of detail, I find it hard to believe that Larry McMurtry didn't actually live in the 1870s, the same way I can't imagine Tolkein not spending time in Middle Earth -- the places and customs both books describe are so real as to be alien.

I was happy to learn there are two sequels to Lonesome Dove (and both are its equal in length). Guess I should be thanking McMurtry's typewriter too.