Five Thoughts Upon the Occasion of Finishing Lonesome Dove

I would've not been a great cowboy.

Earlier this summer, I put up a poll on Instagram asking which "dead white guy" book I should read this summer:Lonesome Dove, The Grapes of Wrath, or The Brothers Karamazov. Lonesome Dove won in a landslide! I had no idea so many people -- and so many people from a WIDE swath of otherwise disparate literary tastes -- had read and loved this book. I heard from writers I admire, readers with whom I hadn't talked in months, even an old friend from college -- all said Lonesome Dove was one of their favorite novels of all time.

Parallel to this was another thing I didn't even know about, but soon discovered: Lots and lots of other people were also reading Lonesome Dove. In March, Esquire even published a story titled "Why Is Everyone Reading Lonesome Dove?" The easiest explanation, and these days, the one immutable rule of book trends: When something weird happens, blame TikTok. BookTok may partially explain it, and Larry McMurtry's death in August 2023 certainly helped renew interest, but likely the biggest reason: It's just really freakin' good. BookTok occasionally leads us astray (cough, Colleen Hoover, cough cough), but in the case of Lonesome Dove, it led us to the promised land. And I'm super glad for once to be caught up in good book trend.

And so in mid-June, I began my Lonesome Dove journey. I spent about six weeks with this novel, whittling away its 858 pages a chapter or so a day. I finished it yesterday. I absolutely loved it. Here are five random thoughts.

5. The Lonesome Dove Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is real -- After I started reading the novel, I began to see it everywhere. Sports personality Ryen Russillo posted on Threads just a couple days ago, "Lonesome Dove really picks up after the first 300 pages" (he's not wrong). Host of NPR's "Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me" Peter Sagal recommended it to someone on Bluesky. I got fed an ad for Peacock with a promo for the late-1980s miniseries with Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones (not gonna lie, that creeped me out a little). And so, whether it really was, or I was just noticing it more, Lonesome Dove was/is ubiquitous.

4. The "head hopping": A craft no-no that somehow works here -- McMurtry does something here with his omniscient narrator every writing teacher you've ever had has warned you against doing: Head-hopping. What that means is that sometimes he jumps from characters' thoughts to characters' thoughts from paragraph to paragraph. At first this was a little distracting. You have to pay attention to be sure you know whose having a think now. But eventually you just learn that's how this book is going to be and you deal with it. Pulitzer Prizes won by Larry McMurtry 1, Pulitzer Prizes won be me 0. So who am I to nit-pick?

3. Man vs. nature -- I feel like this is a too-easy comment, but I have to say that I sure would not have made it as a cowboy. Not only do I not like to go more than a day without showering, I hate snakes, bugs, and anything with more than four legs. In this book, there's a scene where a dude dies after being attacked by water moccasins. There's a several-hours-long grasshopper storm. A bull and a bear engage in a fight to the death (which consternated the Chicago sports fan in me). And that's just the tip of the grassy plains. Yikes. No thanks.

2. It's a very long novel, but it doesn't feel long, and it's deep, but the pacing is just right -- It only took me a while to read, because I was reading lots of other things concurrently. But man, when you sink into this book, you really sink in. Such an amazing adventure. One of my biggest surprises in reading this novel was the depth of character. There is a ton of interiority here! I don't read a ton (any!) Westerns, and the blurb on the back tells you that if you're only going to read one Western, make it this one, and so that's advice I'll probably follow, but I was really impressed by how fully realized these characters feel, especially because there's so many of them, and especially because some of them are women.

1. Gus McCrae is now one of my Top 5 favorite characters in all of literature -- If you judge your protagonists by how much you'd like to have a beer or six in the bar with them, as I do, well then that's why Gus is now in my top 5. The wise-cracking, long-winded former Ranger is as quick with a quip as he was on the draw back in his day. But now that he's older and has hitched his wagon permanently to the irascible Call, he's more about the chat than the chase. And that's just fine. Because this guy is infinitely entertaining. At least to us. Not so much to Call.