Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove is the darling of BookTok. It deserves the hype.

Thoughts on one of our great American novels.

Near the Yellowstone River in Wyoming—one of the landmarks the cowboys in the book sought out.

It seems like every guy with a BookTok or Instagram account about books has either read or is reading Lonesome Dove, and most of them are in agreement that it's one of the best books that they've ever read. Writers I admire like Elisa Gabbert said it was one of her favorites of last year. Kevin Morby has cited it as an influence. Adam Gnade references it. A couple of weeks ago it was announced that someone had bought the rights to all of Larry McMurtry’s novels that include these characters, so expect a streaming series or movies or both.

A quick plot summary in case you’re still reading this and haven’t read the book: Two ex-Texas rangers form a ragtag band of cowhands and misfits that round up a cattle herd to drive from Texas to Montana because they’re bored, and because they’ve heard that Montana is beautiful, that the land there is not yet settled, and that if they can make it up there, they can start their own ranch. They take the word of one of their former Ranger buddies who is of questionable moral character and decide to go on this dangerous, long, and difficult journey to some land they've never been. All they're going off of is a name and an idea: Montana.

All the attention is for good reason. The book is a great adventure, with an extensive cast of characters, almost on the scale of an epic Russian classic, but with cowboys. It depicts an important period in our history, one made more important because so much has been said about this brief span of time in America’s formative years. A time when the land was still open enough that people from Texas and other parts of the southern U.S., even the Midwest, could gather up a bunch of cattle, a lot of them roaming free and available if you had the horses. People did this for something like 30 years. Most of them had come over from Europe and left their families behind, never to see them again, never to see their homeland again. So they certainly had the genetic background for risk.

I find the resurgence in popularity of this book interesting, if not surprising. I'm not sure that McMurtry was ever considered to be one of our most respected literary writers, though his success is certainly a good indicator of the quality of the writing — at least in his ability as a storyteller. And it makes sense that Hollywood or whoever would want to capitalize on this moment and refresh the material. I vaguely remember as a kid the enjoyment my parents had watching the original mini-series. Seemed like it was an event when it came on TV, where we knew it was airing on a certain time every night, and we made sure that we were done with our work and made sure to watch it. Or at least we taped it, commercials and everything.

Next we might see James Michener’s Centennial get popular again. Those are the two big stories that I remember resonating with my family. Maybe because of the part in Lonesome Dove where they get to Ogallala, which is my family's part of the world. I grew up not far to the west of there, in those great plains, that wide open country. I liked when Clara (my Grandma’s name) was trying to get Gus and Call to stay there, saying there's plenty of unsettled country just north of here. You don’t have to go all the way to Montana.

At that time, the Nebraska plains had not been settled. A lot of Oglala Lakota still fought for their land, and Red Cloud and Crazy Horse had not been tricked and killed by the white man yet. The men could have just stayed there, but it would have made for a shorter book.

I saw some people online complaining that aside from some benevolent Crow toward the end of the novel, most of the indigenous people in the story are violent, brutal murderers. Blue Duck is almost cartoonishly terrifying with his rage and anger and viciousness. But I find his response to the destruction of his people to simply be someone who knows he’s at war, and his actions are in line with what we’ve seen in wars forever. He steals children, rapes women, and kills settlers and destroys their property — he does everything he possibly can to defend his tribe and to slow the eradication of his people. That murderous reaction to genocide tracks with me.

The other part that's interesting to me about the book is how it breaks so many rules that contemporary editors and agents try to enforce today. The story takes almost 100 pages before the action starts and the cattle drive really begins. Today’s agents or editors would say let's get to the action sooner. “Where's the conflict?” I guarantee the publishing industry wouldn’t let an unknown writer publish this book at 850 pages.

The simple lesson to take from the success of this book is that people want characters that they can care about and understand, even if some of the characters are horrible. In my opinion, Jake Spoon is the most deplorable character in this long book for his general apathy toward not just the fate of Lorena and his fellow man, but for the way he takes no responsibility for himself. McMurtry takes the time to get inside the mind of Spoon enough that you might even have sympathy for the feeble decisions he makes.

In a way, this book is The Lord of the Rings for cowboys, or at least The Hobbit. Similar to War and Peace, it reads more like a genre novel than like literary fiction. It's not trying to be clever with its style. There's almost no description of anything for the sake of description. No info dumps. No long passages describing the weather or the plains or what the light looks like coming across the prairie. Yet there’s still a strong sense of atmosphere and the environment. The weather is a main character, but it's always told through the reactions of the characters, or through the eyes of someone, for example, who's waking up in the morning and looking out across the prairie, or one with the dust in his eyes from riding at the back of the herd.

So much of contemporary writing is done in close third person point of view, and there are all kinds of arbitrary craft rules around limiting POV and limiting what we can know about a character. But to me that just limits the reader’s experience. Same with the theory of the iceberg. I still love Hemingway, but did he write any books that were more exciting and pleasurable to read than Lonesome Dove? I’m not sure. Life is short, so I don’t know if I’ll start a re-read any time soon, but I’m looking forward to taking to the cattle trail with McMurtry again at some point. It really is one of the great American novels.