I recently finished reading Lonesome Dove, that staple of American Literature that was made famous by the all-star TV miniseries from 1989.
In the first few pages, I laughed regularly at McMurtry's phraseology and regular witticisms. I fell into the genre enough that, ten pages into the book, I stopped to write a ~1300 word story with the same flavor (though perhaps not the same quality of writing). A hundred chapters later, the tragedy ended with a whimper, having wrung everything possible out of the characters and then some.
Something that struck me about the novel, though not so much the story, was that almost everything I've been taught about how not to write showed up in McMurtry's style. Head hopping is rampant throughout, to the point of becoming a feature of the novel. The beginning of Part Three is page after page of infodump. One passage, like the Tom Bombadil encounter in Lord of the Rings, had nothing to do with the story at large, and the minor character that had the encounter barely reflected on it and it had nothing to do with his ultimate disposition. Speaking of characters, there were so many who were superfluous to the core story that they began to feel like sagebrush that had to be waded through to get to the watering hole. And finally, at one point, one of the main characters specifically chose to let his favorite horse go graze while he took a lesser horse out on watch with him, but then McMurtry closes the scene by mentioning the favorite horse being out there with him.
Given all this, I'm not encouraged to read more McMurtry. The funny thing is that I know people, authors I respect, who love that novel. I will say that I learned quite a bit about character development from reading the introspections of not only Call and McRae, but Lorie, July, and the rest. It was certainly worth my time to read. I just wish it had been written better.
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