Despite my love for the miniseries Lonesome Dove, reading the novel on which it was based somehow never became a tangible idea until I watched it again with a friend - whose wife happened to own a copy of the book. Said copy was loaned to me, and 945 glorious pages later, my newfound love for the book sent me off in search of the sequel - Streets Of Laredo, and the two prequels to Lonesome Dove - Dead Man’s Walk and Comanche Moon.
For the uninitiated, Lonesome Dove is a sprawling epic about a former Texas Ranger - Woodrow F. Call - living quietly in the small town of Lonesome Dove who decides on a whim that he wants to be the first man to start a cattle ranch in Montana. With the aid of his old partner, Gus McCrae, and his old companions, Deets and Pea Eye, Call rounds up a couple thousand head of cattle and starts a two thousand mile drive toward Montana. Gus comes along out of friendship and to see his old flame - Clara - who is married and living in Nebraska.
The most stunning thing about Lonesome Dove is the sheer confidence with which McMurtry wrote it. He takes his time, never afraid of losing your interest, sometimes delving into the point of view of different characters - even secondary ones - for pages at a time, seeing what they see and feeling what they feel. The death of one particular character, who is stabbed while sleeping and can’t determine if he’s dreaming or awake as he dies, is one of the single best passages I’ve read in any novel.
And the portrait of the old West he paints is incredibly vivid. Nature is both beautiful and horrible. Lightning shatters trees and electrifies the herd. The sun burns men and dust chokes them. Violence is commonplace. Indians gut and castrate their victims. Horse thieves arbitrarily kill innocent farmers and burn their bodies. Bandits rape and kill without a second thought. Life is cheap and sordid. It’s a completely convincing and authentic vision of the old West.
Put simply, Lonesome Dove has everything one hopes for in a novel - rich characters, a compelling narrative, terrific dialogue and prose, suspense, surprises, and a feeling at the end that you visited another world and met new people. People you came to care about, and will miss spending time with.
The sequel, Streets of Laredo, picks up several years later. Call is a much older man, now working as a bounty hunter of sorts, and is hired to dispose of Joey Garza, a Mexican bandit who is single-handedly fleecing the railroad. Other characters from Lonesome Dove reappear, others do not - either because they met their end in Lonesome Dove, or because McMurtry ruthlessly disposes of them in the early pages of Streets Of Laredo.
For a fan of Lonesome Dove, this is the most shocking aspect of Streets Of Laredo - learning that characters you became attached to in the previous novel died violent, sometimes absurd deaths in between novels. This has two effects - it clears the decks to tell a more fatalistic story, but unfortunately it also undermines a number of characters and story lines in Lonesome Dove. Halfway through Streets Of Laredo, I began to suspect that McMurtry was doing this deliberately.
Written in the aftermath of a heart ailment, McMurtry’s strongest work in Streets Of Laredo are the passages where Call must face the eventual dissolution of his strength from old age and injuries. Without giving away the ending, Call’s fate is, as the saying goes, shocking but inevitable. And given the character’s history with women, quite touching.
Streets Of Laredo doesn’t have the scope or grandeur of Lonesome Dove. It’s a smaller, bleaker story, but for those who want to know what became of the surviving characters in Lonesome Dove, Streets Of Laredo does tie up all the loose ends from its predecessor… whether you like it or not.
And now, the prequels… Dead Man’s Walk introduces us to Gus and Call as mere teenagers - Gus a runaway and Call an orphan, who end up in the Texas Rangers mainly because they’re so poor they need a job, even a life-threatening one. On their first expedition, Gus has a nighttime encounter in the desert with the Indian warrior Buffalo Hump - a fierce, powerful man carrying a heavy mass of deformed flesh between his shoulders. Buffalo Hump puts a spear in Gus’ hip and nearly kills him. Completely outmatched by the Indians, the Rangers are forced to retreat to Austin. Then, on an expedition to invade and annex Santa Fe, the Rangers are decimated by Buffalo Hump and his men. The survivors are captured by the Mexican army, and forced to walk the ‘Dead Man’s Walk’ from Santa Fe to El Paso to face execution.
McMurtry really pours it on in this book. The action is brutal and graphic - scalping, disembowelment, castration, leprosy - you name it. Our heroes suffer all the pains of hell and then some. Gus is speared, Call is nearly whipped to death, both nearly die of thirst in the desert, and at one point are forced to drink urine from the disemboweled bladder of a dead horse!
In the plus column, Buffalo Hump is a fascinating villain who eventually fathers the main villain of Lonesome Dove - Blue Duck - with a kidnapped Mexican girl. Gus and Call’s new companions are endearing, especially the tracker Bigfoot Wallace and the heavy-set whore Matilda Roberts, who proves as formidable as any man on their journey. And for Lonesome Dove fans, some of the connective tissue - Gus meeting Clara, Call meeting Maggie - is fun to read.
But two things troubled me about the book. It eventually deteriorates into a series of violent set pieces, almost a carnival of horrors, without a real plot. Characters suffer, some die, and then the survivors suffer some more. Also, Gus and Call are inexplicably inert heroes. They do little to advance the story, they’re simply a couple of kids who get swept along in a wave of horrific events. At first, this was understandable, seeing as how they’re just inexperienced boys, but by the end of the novel I wanted to see them take action - and they never did. Again, I suspected that McMurtry was subtly undermining the heroic characters he’d created in Lonesome Dove.
And again, without giving away the ending, the conclusion of Dead Man’s Walk is so absurd, out of left field and bizarre one wonders if McMurtry cooked it up over a weekend because he simply didn’t know how to end the book.
Finally we come to Comanche Moon, which bridges the gap to Lonesome Dove. Gus and Call are several years older. Gus’ efforts to woo Clara are proving futile, while Call’s relationship with Maggie is becoming more difficult for him to manage. She wants marriage, but he’s hesitant to marry a whore, and when she becomes pregnant Call is beset with doubts as to who the father is. Meanwhile, their old nemesis Buffalo Hump decides it’s time for his people to take the offensive one last time and terrorizes the countryside, eventually invading and pillaging the city of Austin itself - a real incident known as The Great Raid of 1840.
Comanche Moon provides the reader with even more connective tissue. We meet Deets, Pea Eye, Jake Spoon and Blue Duck, all central characters in Lonesome Dove. It also introduces a striking new character - Captain Inish Scull, a wealthy, somewhat crazy adventurer. When Indians steals his horse during the night, Scull abandons the Rangers in the middle of the desert to pursue his prized animal into Mexico, where Scull is captured and tortured by a sadistic Mexican bandit named Ahumado.
What does the Scull subplot have to do with the rest of the story? Almost nothing, but it takes up at least a quarter of the book. And while it’s admittedly compelling, it feels like a novella grafted onto a novel. Even worse, McMurtry’s preoccupation with Buffalo Hump takes up large chunks of the book, relegating Gus and Call to secondary characters who - again - do virtually nothing to advance the story. By the end of Comanche Moon, McMurtry’s determination to undercut Lonesome Dove and defy expectation left me feeling frustrated and cheated. Yes, all the dots connect, but it’s perfunctory and uninspired.
By his own admission, McMurtry wrote the Lonesome Dove prequels because the money he was offered helped finance his antiquarian bookstore, Booked Up, in Archer City, Texas. I’m glad he got the dough, and I’m sure it’s a great bookstore (I look forward to visiting it someday), but I wish he’d been a little more considerate of his audience in writing the prequels. His talents as a writer are still on display, but his lack of interest is obvious, as is his curious contempt for Lonesome Dove since he subtly undermines it at every turn.
Put simply - read Lonesome Dove, ignore the others.
The math on this one was simple. I recently enjoyed plowing through McMurtry’s masterwork, Lonesome Dove, and I love the film Hud - so reading McMurtry’s first novel, upon which Hud was based, was an easy decision.
The other major difference between the book and the film is the character of Alma, the house maid Hud relentlessly tries to seduce, played brilliantly by Patricia Neal in the film. In the book, this character is black, and Hud’s advances are far more brutal. I’m not surprised that this character didn’t reach the screen intact - somehow, I don’t think audiences in the 1960’s would have accepted seeing Paul Newman try to rape a black woman.
One of the few good habits I’ve acquired recently is a willingness to study a subject or pick up a book that I know little or nothing about. I spotted The Captain on a shelf at the Santa Monica Library, read the description - a tugboat captain helping to escort Allied vessels though enemy waters in World War II - and said, “Why not?”
I can only imagine what my reaction to Watchmen would have been had I read in in 1987 at age sixteen. It’s a dense, epic, revisionist comic book (excuse me - graphic novel) that deftly subverts traditional comic-book heroes and, at the same time, makes several pointed observations about American politics and history.
However, when it comes to characterization, this accumulation of detail is a virtue. Each of Watchmen’s supposed superheroes is a fleshed-out human being, and you care for them - even the psychotic ones. Indeed, Rorschach is the most endearing of the bunch, and he’s completely insane. And by delving so deeply into the characters and their histories, Moore generates a comic-book mythology where one previously did not exist - not an easy thing to do in twelve issues. 
Upon completing the novel Lonesome Dove, I discovered that certain elements of the story are based in actual Texas history. My beloved protagonists, Gus and Call, are loosely based on two real cattlemen - Oliver Loving and Charles Goodnight, who drove two thousand head of cattle from Texas to Colorado, establishing the Goodnight / Loving trail. When Loving was struck by Indian arrows and died of blood poisoning, Goodnight carried his body all the way back to Texas for burial, as Call does for Gus.
You gotta hand it to Joe Eszterhas… in a town where the screenwriter is routinely screwed, he did his fair share of screwing, literally and figuratively. At his best, Eszterhas had his finger on the pulse of the filmgoing public with Flashdance, Jagged Edge, and Basic Instinct - at his worst, he put forth inconceivably awful films such as Showgirls, which nearly destroyed the careers of everyone involved, and Burn Hollywood Burn. 
The best thing one can say about the book is that it seems to be honest. Eszterhas spares no one, including himself. I’m sure he left plenty of things out, but what he does say feels truthful. And the book’s final passages, in which Eszterhas is stricken with throat cancer and leaves California, are simply riveting. He speaks clearly and honestly about his fear of dying, and the difficulty of giving up cigarettes, alcohol, and bad food after a lifetime of consuming them all to excess. Eventually, Eszterhas beat the cancer, but not before losing the majority of his voice box. 
This book is not for everyone. It’s long, it rambles, and it digresses - but it’s rarely boring, and it’s always honest, sometimes painfully so. 
It’s simply amazing to think that this man, who had little potential and no resources, rose up by sheer force of will to become one of the greatest directors we’ve ever had in both theatre and film. When you read a play by Miller, Odets, or Williams that was initially directed by Kazan, the descriptive passages and stage direction are based on Kazan’s staging of the play. So in an odd way, Kazan was a silent contributor to the final versions of these classic plays.
Finally - a plot! Sort of…
Well, Burroughs doesn’t do that. When he conjures up an idea like Tarzan teaching a tribe of apes how to paddle a boat, he just runs with it and never looks back. This’ll sound arrogant since Burroughs is a literary legend and I’m an unpublished writer blogging for free, but his writing reminds me of the stuff I used to do as a teenager - colorful, imaginative, bursting with energy, and incredibly stupid sometimes. 
Everyone’s favorite vine-swinging ape-man is back in his second adventure. This time around he battles Russian spies, Arab ivory merchants, degenerate descendants of Atlantis and (of course) a few lions and tigers. He also fends off the affections of a beautiful Russian countess, the daughter of an Arab sheik and a high priestess of Atlantis, all the while pining away for his beloved Jane Porter. 
To give Burroughs credit, he maintains one plot thread - the animosity between Tarzan and Rokoff - as he shifts from what is essentially a spy thriller to a jungle adventure. But the shift is so abrupt it feels as if Burroughs’ imagination ran dry and he decided, “What this book needs a lost city, a decaying civilization and a lost treasure!”
As promised 
Where to begin… first of all, it’s astonishing that in the 90+ years since this character’s inception, no one has ever managed to put him on film properly. Much like Conan The Barbarian, Hollywood often reduces the character to a dumb, hulking brute when in fact he’s highly intelligent, speaks several languages, and has a straightforward yet three-dimensional personality. 
The first half of the book is a genuine classic. It’s smart, focused, and despite the nutty concept at its core, Burroughs writes so convincingly you believe it. As Tarzan learns and grows, eventually becoming the ideal male, Burroughs drives home his central theme - that our ability to think, reason, and plan ahead makes us superior to beasts.
As expected, Tarzan kills a lot of apes, lions, tigers, etc., especially when he encounters white men for the first time. They prove to be completely inept in the jungle, and Tarzan is repeatedly rescuing them - and Jane, with whom he inevitably falls in love.