I finally read Lonesome Dove, and I’m still not sure how to feel about it. Or rather, I know exactly how I feel about it, but I’m sure I will offend the many who put this book in their list of “Top 10 Books That All Men Need to Read.”
The Banter Was the Best Part
Augustus ((Gus) McCrae and Woodrow Call are the perfect yin-yang. Gus is all talk — philosophical, funny, endlessly willing to argue a point just to hear himself argue it. Call barely speaks, and when he does it’s usually to shut Gus down. It’s really the main reason I kept turning the page.
Their back-and-forth carries the entire front half of the book. Gus needles Call about his stubbornness, his refusal to say anything true about how he feels, his need to always be doing something instead of saying something. Call mostly just grunts and keeps working. But you can feel decades of friendship forged in working with each other. It’s he kind of friendship where the insults are shorthand for all their experiences together.
The Cattle Drive Was Never About Cattle
What got me, though, was realizing why they’re driving three thousand head of stolen cattle to Montana in the first place. It’s not really about the money, and it’s not really about Montana. It’s about two men who fought a war, came out the other side, and didn’t know how to be still, or simply didn’t know what to do with their time.
Gus and Call built the Hat Creek Cattle Company and then sat there for years, doing odd jobs to keep themselves entertained. The drive is the thing they invent so they have somewhere to point themselves. A project. A reason to get up.
As I’m considering the next phases of my life and career, there’s something recognizable about people who are approaching the sunset of their career, and wondering where they can be valuable. I think it’s the same reason that many aren’t really retiring to a life of shuffleboard and golf, but are finding a new mission, any mission, because stillness feels like the real threat – just a few steps away from the grave. The cattle drive isn’t really the goal. Avoiding stillness is the goal, which brings me to my next point.
Then Everyone Loses
And here’s where the book lost me a little, even as I admired the dialog.
Everyone loses. Not just dies — loses. Gus’s death is the most obvious gut-punch, but it’s not isolated. Almost every character who reaches for something — love, redemption, a home, a second chance — has it taken away, usually in some cruel, almost arbitrary way. Nobody gets to keep what they wanted. The book doesn’t just deny happy endings; it seems determined to deny any ending that feels earned.
I understand the argument for it. Maybe the author taking the myth of the American West head on — completely destroying the romantic version of the cattle drive, the gunslinger, and the frontier hero. Perhaps he wanted to show another side of it, that the idealized cowboy was more loneliness and bad luck dressed up as adventure. And to be fair, that’s an interesting thing for a novel to do.
But as a reader, it left me a little hollowed out in a way I’m not sure was worth it. I didn’t need everyone to win. I just wanted someone to. In the end, finishing the book felt like I just finished a project or an assignment rather than being entertained or moved. Again, it could be that this novel was just not written for me.
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