Word: mccrae
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...couple of old Texas Rangers on a cattle drive, this Pulitzer prizewinner was McMurtry at the absolute top of his form. The author, as much in love with Lonesome Dove as his readers were, contrived a sequel, Streets of Laredo (1993). It was pale and sad because Gus McCrae, one of his heroes, was dead, and the other, Woodrow Call, was old. Then in 1995 McMurtry reached back with a thunderation called Dead Man's Walk to pick up his heroes as daft and randy 19-year-old Rangers on a misbegotten invasion of Mexican territory...
...Call and McCrae are the author's unsolved problems. In Lonesome Dove they were amusing middle-aged adolescents, which seemed to be the author's gloss on the American West. This means, however, that in the long present novel they spend many, many chapters not maturing: Gus mooning for his lost Clara, and Woodrow being cold to Maggie, his son's mother. When they turn sideways on stage, they are seen to be band-sawed from plywood, a drawback that at last seems to matter...
...Williams has eight arrests and three convictions behind him. In Jamestown he seems to have used his urban of-the-street credibility to impress the disaffected girls he picked up in local parks. Chautauqua investigators believe in some cases Williams may have bartered drugs for sex. (Williams' grandmother Eleanor McCrae told the Buffalo News she believed he contracted HIV from a homosexual in a youth detention facility in New York City...
McMurtry has a fine time with youthful damnfoolishness, and so does the reader. The young Rangers are randy and daft, and so coltish around women that, as in Lonesome Dove, they refer to sexual congress as a "poke." Call and McCrae survive by dumb luck, though it's not clear by adventure's end that either has learned a dime's worth of sense. In fact, they are still...
...about three decades of imprudence and dusty commotion to get through before they become the leathery, intermittently shrewd men of Lonesome Dove. The prequel hasn't really completed its job. Obviously a postprequel or two is required before the central novel can decently begin. Buffalo Hump still lurks. McCrae seems about to marry, though surely not if the sly heartbreaker in the general store is thinking clearly. And the great-grandlitters of pigs not yet born and rattlers not yet hatched must colonize the town of Lonesome Dove, a backwater that no one, least of all the two saddlesore heroes...