Larry McMurtry (1936–2021)

So, at the end of the last volume, we found ourselves filled with deep and terrible misgivings for the future of our vulnerable band. Turns out I had nothing to worry about! Absolutely nothing bad happens to anyone in this book. All journeys are brief and easy. All sojourns safe and comfortable. All dilemmas resolved with wisdom, all heart's desire fulfilled, all children grow strong and beautiful and above average, all disputes settled with civilised words over cups of hot tea. The buffalo show more roam, the Mexicans prosper, the Indians thrive, the Europeans bring peace and plenty wherever they settle.

All amazingly unexpected developments in a Larry McMurtry novel! One would, perhaps, have anticipated further hardship and cruelties to plague our adventurers, to have the heart torn out of the novel and out of the reader in one flat, brief page of devastating mortality right at the dead centre of the book, from which there can only be long, lingering, spiraling fall towards an ending. Even that's not enough, and random horror begets an explosion of bloody, vengeful, sin-killing violence that lays grief on grief. Or it would if McMurtry had written more or less true to form and not produced the passages of bucolic bliss and happiness, instead of delivering the surviving frail and ravaged community of people, united in sharing a brimful of human suffering, to a more or less safe end, forever altered by their experiences of America in her birth-pangs and a landscape in its death-throes.

Lalalala. show less

In Larry McMurtry’s engaging sequel to Desert Rose, we’re never sure just who the child of the title might be. Is it Harmony’s daughter Pepper, whose death from AIDS, nearly a continent away from her estranged mother, sets off the novel? Or is it Harmony herself, who is thrown into a complex emotional whirlpool composed of guilt, grief, and longing for the loss of so many things in her life?

Harmony’s first instinct is to reach out to her friends in the Las Vegas casino community show more she’s called home for decades. They quite wisely insist that she contact her sisters in Oklahoma, and the meat of the story takes off from there. The sisters arrive, bickering (as they will continue to do throughout the book), but are united in the determination that Harmony and her five-year-old son Eddie must move back to Oklahoma to be near family. In the midst of whirlwind packing, temper tantrums, the acquisition of a donated car, and tearful good-byes, Harmony reaches the utterly logical decision that they should “swing by” New York City on the way to Oklahoma in order to find out more about Pepper’s life, and death.

You have to give McMurtry a lot of leeway here, as his story hangs together only by the most unlikely circumstance and sometimes threatens to veer into fantasy territory. The major issue, for me, was that few of the characters have any kind of job, and the others are involved in a variety of semi-legal hustles, yet the sisters and Eddie seem to have no trouble jumping onto an airplane when their car breaks down and, once they arrive in The Big Apple and the entourage keeps picking up numbers (eventually peaking at 12 if you include the dog, which you must because the tyrannical child-monster Eddie says so), they have no trouble staying housed, fed, transported, and entertained in one of most notoriously expensive tourist traps in the country.

A strong secondary issue is Eddie himself. It’s incredibly difficult to write a compelling child character in a novel centered on grown-ups without creating a puppet-like cliché that just kind of hangs around the edges of the drama, popping up occasionally to deliver a cute line and then being shuffled offstage. This character, however, is anything but puppet-like. He is a bright, curious preschooler with fixed opinions about nearly everything, and no hesitation in sharing them. McMurtry has to keep reminding us that Eddie is a curly-haired blonde cherub with an essentially loving disposition, in order to keep us from wanting to strangle the little monster when he repeatedly demands that all the adults in the vicinity cater to his whims.

Eddie manages to survive, as does Harmony, but not all the characters in the book get a happy-ever-after. Disturbingly, Harmony – near the end of the novel – turns on a lifeboat mentality that seems harsh, given the amount of support and generosity she has received on her journey.

Part road trip, part family drama, part an exploration of surviving grief and coming into one’s own agency as a result, The Late Child is an immersive read. The richness of the characters and the underlying dry humor McMurtry finds in their flawed humanity provide plenty of reasons to go along for the ride. show less

Not having been an avid reader of westerns, this is the first of McMurtry's books I've read. I'm not even sure why I picked it up at the used bookstore, other than a vague memory that besides having written a great many good novels (or at least people said they were good), he was the owner of an enormous number of books and therefore at least partially a kindred soul.

This short collection of essays covers so much ground and manages to be both so simple and so multilayered and complex, that show more it's hard to describe. It is, in a sense, a memoir, but more than that, it's an interweaving of ideas about the end of the brief and arduous life of frontier settlers and cowboys, the art of story-telling, the experience and value of reading, and the world of book scouting/book collecting, which appears even more today to be dying. Having given such an unsatisfactory summary, let me try to make it up to you by simply saying that if you love books, if you have a sense of nostalgia for the past--regardless of where your past may lie--and if you actually think sometimes about the value of storytelling, this book is likely to touch you deeply.

I read a lot. About a book every day or two. This one, at only about 200 pages, I took two weeks to read. Not because it was slow or difficult. Although it certainly gave me plenty to think about and I'll definitely read it again to see what I've missed, it was entirely enjoyable. I found myself slowing down, lolligagging as it were, because I didn't want this conversation to end. And it did feel like a conversation. Despite the differences in our ages, genders, and geographic roots, I found much in common with McMurtry. It was like meeting a friend you haven't seen in years and finding that the connection you once shared hasn't changed at all--except, of course, I've never met McMurtry and likely never will. I'm tempted, of course, to make a pilgrimage of sorts to Archer City, Texas, to explore the remaining quarter million volumes of his once-larger bookstore, to see what his offerings reveal of this man who so cogently expresses thoughts I've long harbored. Instead, I think I'll take a look at more of his work and encourage my friends to do the same. show less

“It's a fine world, though rich in hardships at times.”

Lonesome Dove is a bedraggled little town in southern Texas near the Rio Grande. Call and Gus are retired captains from the Texas Rangers, who capably fought Mexicans and Indians for twenty years. Now they've got a small ranch that Call runs with Gus's lackadaisical help, supported by a group of men who wait for directions. Gus likes to play cards in the local saloon and frolic with Lorena, a young girl whose life has led her to show more "sporting" (prostitution). Her natural beauty deeply affects several of the main characters. It's the 1870s, and Call gets smitten with the idea of driving cattle all the way to the undeveloped country of Montana, where majestic land can be claimed and make you rich.

A major strength of this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel lies in its realism. We get to know a host of believable characters well, and the harsh day to day realities of life, on the drive and in the towns and ranches along the way, are much more powerful than any mythic treatment of America's west. It's a fine world, though rich in hardships. The unexpected must be expected, and when it flares up, it's pulse-pounding for the reader, including gunfights, gun-less fights, hangings, life-threatening escapes, horse theft, grizzlies, a river boiling with snakes, and other potential disasters. There are matters of honor, and characters with no moral limitations whatsoever. The implacable and nightmarish Indian Blue Duck glories in the havoc he creates, and challenges taciturn Call and always-talking Gus in sometimes devastating ways. The land they travel is gorgeous but dangerous, and Montana a prize worth attaining.

Larger issues are a constant backdrop to the vivid life of surviving and taking care of business.

"The sun spread reddish-gold light through the shining bushes, among which a few goats wandered, bleating. Even when the sun rose above the low bluffs to the south, a layer of light lingered for a bit at the level of the chaparral, as if independent of its source. Then the sun lifted clear, like an immense coin. The dew quickly died, and the light that filled the bushes like red dirt dispersed, leaving clear, slightly bluish air.
It was good reading light by then, so Augustus applied himself for a few minutes to the Prophets. He was not overly religious, but he did consider himself a fair prophet and liked to study the styles of his predecessors. They were mostly too long-winded, in his view, and he made no effort to read them verse for verse—he just had a look here and there, while the biscuits were browning.”

The men struggle with their yearning for women, and for many of them, with their clueless inability to understand or talk naturally with them. Gus has been married twice, and entrances Lorena and others with his confident loquaciousness. But he yearns for the brainy and bold Clara, the one who got away, who saw early on that two alphas would make for a bad marriage. Call had one serious relationship that conflicted with his drive to lead men, and he's leery of marriage. “I don't see how being married could be any worse than listening to you talk for twenty years, but that still ain't much of a recommendation for it.” That relationship he had nonetheless has far-reaching consequences.

I'm sure everyone who reads this book has his or her favorite characters. I got a big kick out of Clara, who sees through Gus's spieling to a good man and lifelong friend, and who detests the uncomprehending Call for what others view as heroic. She tells Call, “And I’ll tell you another thing: I’m sorry you and Gus McCrea ever met. All you two did was ruin one another, not to mention those close to you.” But they're heroes. Can she possibly be right?

McMurtry is the son and grandson of cattlemen, and the book reportedly is based on the lives of two cattlemen who created the Goodnight-Loving Trail in the 1860s. Lonesome Dove's realism is compelling, and this is a five star read. show less