Why Read Larry McMurtry

It might not be LONESOME DOVE, but STREETS OF LAREDO shares its magic ...

It is possible that the most unanimously loved novel among Boomers exchange Larry McMurtry’s epic, Lonesome Dove. The last cattle ride in the West theme was sung by a collection of unforgettable characters who were then further sealed into our collective memory by a tv miniseries that may have soared higher than the book. Because of its honored place in my reading and viewing experience, I shied away from reading more of Larry McMurtry. He produced sequels I scanned in bookstores but got no further. The length of the sequels did not match that of the original but were substantial thus providing a good excuse to not dilute my love of Lonesome Dove. Then, McMurtry died in 2021 and the memorials to him have nagged at me. They mostly agreed that his writing and most of his novels were as good as anything out there but the Western sobriquet undermined his credibility among influential East Coast critics and academics. They too often passed on the “westerns” and pointed to his non-Western output, led by a wickedly good The Last Picture Show. They almost seemed embarrassed to embrace his towering presence in the western literature genre. His biography shows a man who grew up in the landscape of his novels with a childhood and family barely removed from the last days of the Lonesome Dove. He was a professor who read everything, with a c.v. his critics could only dream of. Envy lurks all through this … a Pulitzer Prize, National Humanities Medal and film adaptations that garnered 34 Oscar nominations. This snub was all I needed.

A few weeks ago, I took the plunge and read Streets of Laredo. Only 2/3rds the length of the original, Streets of Laredo begins in a similar fashion – slowly. Soon, however, McMurtry’s ear for dialogue and his carefully, often wordy, efforts at drawing a clear picture of his huge array of characters combines with a plot that begins to take on a Gordian complexity to produce a reading experience that comes close to Lonesome Dove. The Hat Creek outfit from the epic cattle drive are far and few between but several come together around another Western trope, capturing really bad guys who rob trains and burn people. It takes place on both sides of the desiccated landscape of the Mexican border captured so evocatively by McMurtry. Its theme of the fading West and the too often violent individualism that went with it gives the terrific plot depth. There is a 1995 miniseries out there that got little traction. I think I’ll miss that, wait a few months, and then return to this great underrated writer

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