Larry McMurtry's twelfth novel, Anything for Billy, surprises by revisiting a theme that the author, just four or five years ago, appeared to have abandoned for good. Of all his previous books, McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove (1985) seems the new novel's most likely antecedent. In intent and setting, if not in execution and artistry, the two works are very similar.
Both transport the reader back in time to the elusive, fabled "old West." Both attempt to examine the mythmaking process and, obliquely, to distinguish between the myth and the reality of that unique landscape of American history. Indeed, both apparently were intended to undermine the myth of the West and to demonstrate its pernicious effects on the American psyche, past and present.
Lonesome Dove, the chronicle of a quixotic trail drive ramrodded by a pair of former Texas Rangers, Woodrow Call and Gus McCrae, clearly calls into question the myth of the cowboy. Clara, Gus' old girlfriend, no doubt speaks for the author when she gives Call a tongue-lashing that leaves him perplexed but unmoved.
Clara, who loved Gus, had chosen a plodding, dependable man to be her mate and father to her children--a practical decision that highlights the disparity between the cowboy myth and the values of community and of family and child-rearing. Clara tells Call:
I'm sorry you and Gus McCrae ever met. All you two done
was ruin one another, not to mention those close to you…I
didn't want to fight you for him every day of my life. You
men and your promises: they're just excuses to do what you
plan to do anyway, which is leave. You think you've always
done right--that's your ugly pride, Mr. Call. But you
never did right and it would be a sad woman that needed
anything from you. You're a vain coward, for all your
fighting. I despised you then, for what you were, and I
despise you now, for what you're doing.
Lonesome Dove offers many passages and incidents that illustrate the foolishness of the cowboy's ultra-masculine code of behavior. And yet McMurtry's characters in Lonesome Dove seem to have gotten away from him. In spite of the writer's best efforts, they appeal to readers as sympathetic, larger than life--in a word, heroic. Whatever McMurtry intended, for example the scene in which Call goes berserk on the streets of Ogallala, Nebraska, is one of the most compelling episodes in the book.
Call is always on guard, always in control of his emotions, a man who never allows himself to be simply human. Until, that is, he observes some of his drovers being abused by an Army scout in Ogallala. His fury is awesome to behold. It's like a dam bursting, as the emotional restraints of a lifetime spill forth. The reader cannot help cheering Call's righteous anger and, beyond that, seeing him as an embodiment of the true Western hero. Thus, for the myriad McMurtry fans, Lonesome Dove ended up reviving and
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