Let's Bust a Recap : Lonesome Dove

Hi! Believe it or not, I'm still here, and how are we all doing? Can we believe it's only 15 days till Christmas? You hanging in there? With Thanksgiving being so late this year it feels even crazier than usual. Or is that just me? The day after Thanksgiving, I sat down with my laptop and put together drafts for all the books sitting in my book cart waiting to be recapped. I scheduled them for every Monday/Wednesday/Friday in December. 

And then I completely missed the first week of December. And yesterday for that matter. 

But we keep trying and today we're going back to the book that's been sitting in that cart the longest: Lonesome Dove. 

Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel published in 1985 is widely considered to be the greatest cowboy book of all time. And I think it's the first western I've ever actually read, at least as an adult. I grew up on John Wayne movies—shoot-em-ups, as my dad fondly calls them—playing cowboys and Indians with my brothers, and having Lonesome Dove as my introduction to the genre seems like a disservice to any other western that might come after. It is epic and I get why everyone thinks it's the best. 

But where do I begin? First off, I have a little bone to pick with McMurtry. In this newer edition of the book, there's a 2010 preface in which Larry Jeff McMurtry spoils his own book. And I will never forgive him for that. What kind of an author are we dealing with here? Unbelievable. I don't want to speak ill of the dead, but I don't think I could have hung with Larry. He was one of those uppity types that basically got upset when his book got popular because people obviously must not have understood it. Give me a break, sir.

Now that I've got that off my chest: on to the actual book. In the small Texas border town of Lonesome Dove in the late 1870s, we're introduced to two famous retired Texas Rangers: Woodrow F. Call and Augustus McCrae. They're running the Hat Creek Cattle Company and Livery Emporium with a colorful outfit of men and young Newt Dobbs whose late mother was a sweet prostitute named Maggie. When Jake Spoon, one of Gus and Call's old Ranger buddies, drops into Lonesome Dove on the run from the law, waxing poetic about the beauty of the Montana Territory, Call gets it in his head to drive a herd of cattle up and settle the last great frontier. Through a series of events, Jake Spoon and Lorena Wood, Lonesome Dove's lone beautiful prostitute, end up on the cattle drive too and we're off to the races. 

Meanwhile, over in Fort Smith, Arkansas, July Johnson is the sheriff tasked with bringing Jake Spoon to justice, so while the Hat Creek outfit is heading north, July is busy tracking Jake Spoon west across the plains. But July's jaded wife Elmira sees an opportunity in July's departure to make her own getaway from their marriage and hops on a riverboat with a bunch of rough and tumble buffalo hunters, so July's deputy sheriff Roscoe Brown heads out after July to make him aware of his wife's betrayal.

As you can see, there are a lot of moving parts and threads to follow in this 858-page doorstop of a western. Through dangerous river crossings, dust-ups with hostiles, a terrifying abduction, young love, old love, and lots of death, we hang with these characters through the most harrowing experiences imaginable. Lonesome Dove truly is an epic and I echo USA Today's sentiment when I say, "If you read only one western novel in your life, read Lonesome Dove."

My husband and I read this aloud together from March to July and we've been meaning to watch the critically acclaimed 1989 miniseries ever since, which is part of the reason I waited so long to recap this. (Don't get your hopes up: we still haven't gotten around to watching it.) The day we sat down to start this novel, we ended up reading the first 14 chapters which is over 160 pages. Cody and I both loved the characters McMurtry brought to life on the page. But as my husband succinctly put it: Lonesome Dove started strong but didn't end strong. As is the case with a lot of epic works of literature (I'm lookin' at you Anna Karenina, Count of Monte Cristo), after you've spent so much time in the lives of these characters, the ending comes abruptly. And this isn't a spoiler but I will just warn you: no matter what character you set your love on in Lonesome Dove, don't expect a happy ending. The final chapters are bleak. 

For all that, we loved Lonesome Dove and I think it's a novel worth reading. We're still looking forward to settling in with the miniseries sometime this winter to watch Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones bring Gus and Call to life on the screen. Ideally, we'd like to watch it with the rest of my family. We all decided to read it together this year. My brother Reagan flew through it and my sister Sarah is almost done. I'm not sure about everyone else, but come Christmas Day you may catch us all sprawled out on couches with Mom's apple pie watching young Newt try to figure out life in the Old West.