I recently read Lonesome Dove and actually had to stop about 80 percent of the way through since I couldn’t manage it. I loved the writing style a lot, loved the setting, loved the slow pace, desperately loved the characters, but McMurtry prefers having characters suffer unsatisfying and often terribly brutal endings. I love dark stories, but I like the misery to have some kind of poetic value or story purpose, and while I totally understand what the book was going for and I think there is nothing wrong with it, it was a bit too much for me personally.
So, I would love to find a book with a similar Western or neo-Western setting with a slow pace, a writing style similar to McMurtry and a similar level of beautiful character work, just one that doesn’t kill the characters off in such a morbid and often depressing way. Bonus if there’s a Native American perspective of some kind, as I thought that was another thing that Lonesome Dove was lacking a bit.
Thanks!
by pheelka1001
1 Comment
The Brothers K (by David James Duncan not Dostoyevsky)
Prince of Tides
Both brutal in their own way, but not the endings, and no deaths (that I remember.)
I put these all into the canon of greatest American sagas of all time.
Pretty different, but you may like these too. Much lighter mysteries:
Leephorn & Chee series by Tony Hillerman (or his Leephorn Chee and Manuela by his daughter who took over the series after his death and added a woman detective. Hers stand alone without reading her dads you want more modern.)
Walt Longmire series by Craig Johnson (modern western, sheriff solves wyoming crimes)
Something totally different (non fiction), but tangential to request about indigenous peoples – Braiding Sweetgrass and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee