Word: dove
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Lonesome Dove, Texas, is a one-tart town and so quiet you can hear the lady's bedsprings a block away. For those with a thirst, there is the Dry Bean saloon, where customers pass time whittling the edges off the tables. It is the late 19th century. Pyramids of buffalo bones rise on the prairie, the red man is down to his last can of war paint, and a couple of old Texas Rangers have seen the future, and it works without them...
...culture in the Sunbelt, where the air conditioner is king. Yet his novels are not nearly as well known as the movies made from them. Horseman, Pass By is more recognizable as Hud. The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment have had far more viewers than readers. Lonesome Dove, McMurtry's tenth novel, is probably stampeding toward the screen at this moment. But first things first...
...wilderness and sooner or later paddle into the mainstream. McCrae and Call join the mythic flow by stealing a herd of Mexican cattle and driving them from Texas to Montana. Why leave semiretirement and undertake a journey better suited for younger men? One answer is that Lonesome Dove would be a dull book if the two remained proprietors of the Hat Creek Cattle Co. & Livery Emporium ("GOATS AND DONKEY'S NEITHER BOUGHT NOR SOLD/WE DON'T RENT PIGS"). It isn't that life in town can't be dangerous. One can always fall off a porch, get snakebit picking...
...includes Lorena, the local whore with the 14-karat ventricles, who joins the drive north because she has never lived any place cool. She also motivates much of the action when kidnaped by Blue Duck, an Indian whose specialty is killing settlers and selling their horses and children. Lonesome Dove has the highest mortality rate of any novel in recent memory. Characters are shot, stabbed, hanged, drowned, trampled, struck by snakes and lightning. "Gravediggers could make a fortune in these parts" is the sort of manly banter encountered on every other page. When the guys get dreamy...
...Lonesome Dove is not the place to ask it. McMurtry's lip service to psychological conflict is lost to his outsize talent for descriptive narrative. Filmmakers should have no trouble finding visual thrills. The standard stream crossing is perked up by an attack of water moccasins; there is a choice between a dandy sandstorm and a typhoon of grasshoppers; Blue Duck is a menacing piece of work with his necklace of amputated fingers; a bear fights a bull to a draw; and a dead hero is packed in salt and carted more than a thousand ceremonious miles to his grave...