Thread by @AriSchulman

McMurtry complained of the love for Lonesome Dove: "I thought I had written about a harsh time and some pretty harsh people, but, to the public at large, I had produced something nearer to an idealization; instead of a poor man's Inferno, filled with violence, ...

.... faithlessness and betrayal, I had actually delivered a kind of Gone With The Wind of the West, a turnabout I'll be mulling over for a long, long time."

It's strange here to see McMurtry underrate the power of the deconstruction and demythologization of the West he produced.

One of the things that struck me about Lonesome Dove was the jaggedness of it. Characters you expect to be redeemed aren't. Characters who deserve a happy ending are killed randomly and unexpectedly. Loves romantic and filial go unrequited.

It's a gut-punch of a book that ends with a casual imprecation of the story's central object of desire. It's as if McMurtry is bent on giving us a world where things don't work out and ends are left loose.

But Lonesome Dove wasn't "Unforgiven," either — it wasn't a deconstruction of the Western for its own sake. It was just showing the jaggedness of the frontier as it really was, or as he saw it.

I suspect if he had instead wrapped all these stories up in a neat bow the book would have been gobbled by the public and promptly forgotten.

Maybe what made it work was how these characters — most of all Augustus McCrae, but also Newt, Lorie, Clara, July, and ultimately also Gus's real love, Woodrow Call — persist in their yearnings despite the land and its author doing everything it can to show them the folly of it.

Clara curses Woodrow as a fool for agreeing to the journey Gus assigns him in the book's last act. I think we're meant to agree with her but to see the grandness and beauty in it all the same.

McMurtry said people misread as an epic romance what was actually a harsh story of people foolishly intent on their dreams in a brutal world set on cutting them short. But the book lingers just because these two things can very much go together.

—as of course Gus understands in tasking Call with that final journey, which really has no point other than finally forcing Call to tilt at his own windmill: "Texas? Yes, Texas. Yes, that's my favor to you."

Final thing: Robert Duvall is sensational on screen as Gus. It's justly considered by Duvall his best performance.

https://twitter.com/UlteriousFilm/status/1135586754856194050

For those unfamiliar with the book or the movie, I should add that it's also incorrigibly charming, funny, and (McMurtry would hate this, I imagine) sweet.

Absolutely. I'd say it's a perplexing mix of *pessimism* and unshakeable hope, one that a lot of other literary writers try to pull off as a grand cosmic statement, where for McMurtry it just unfolds under its own intent logic.

https://twitter.com/MikeAlbanese/status/1375574867060359169