Lonesome Dove

⚖The case for it

Two retired Rangers, one who will not stop talking and one who barely starts, bicker their way across sixteen hundred miles, and readers call the partnership “a strange marriage.” People who came in disliking westerns report they “laughed out loud, gasped, grinned and ugly-cried twice.” McMurtry hands real motive and inner life to dozens of riders and townspeople instead of using them as scenery. The women, a hardened prostitute and a rancher’s widow and a saloon owner, come out clearer-eyed than any man on the drive. The trail is hail, snakebite, flooded crossings and locusts rather than adventure. One critic: “everything about Lonesome Dove feels true.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Nothing much moves through the first hundred to two hundred pages of a nine-hundred-page book, which readers describe as “painfully slow, supposedly it picks up around page 200,” with some quitting near 120. McMurtry spells out what everyone is feeling as they feel it, so “to say this book is overwritten would be an understatement.” The Native characters are the sharpest failure, with readers saying they have “rarely read anything more stereotyped and offensive” even by 1985. Between the few real confrontations sits a great deal of trail routine. Some finish admiring the craft and report “the story never quite came together for me as a coherent whole.”

— the honest librarian

19h

honest hours

27

sittings