Lonesome Dove
There’s certainly something honest and good about a book that doesn’t try to pretty things up at all. It’s a relief, in a way, how the characters don’t necessarily do the right thing in the end, and just because people love each other doesn’t mean they’re supposed to be together, and how people’s feelings, even the good ones, are never purely one thing or another and often don’t make much sense even to the person feeling them.
So I don’t mean to knock the book. It was really, really good, and besides it wasn’t fair of me, after 900 or so pages of this, to expect a happy resolution. (Or much resolution at all.) However, by around page 940, when it occurred to me that with only 5 pages to go my favorite characters were all either dead (by snakes, bullets, knives, hangings, arrows, etc.), traumatized into craziness, completely alone and seeming like thing would likely stay that way, or probably about to die, it started to feel pretty depressing. Especially since this is all happening in the backdrop of the American West with the remaining Native Americans mostly starving to death and the buffalo pretty much all killed and for what? So that you can drive from Fargo to Billings along those flat endless highways with the cavernous Walmarts every few hundred miles and the gas stations that all look the same and the little dead towns? It seems like such a miserable pointless enterprise, bloody and brutal and terrible and all for nothing.
I did have one idea, which was that if I’d better anticipated how inconclusive and generally unhappy the ending would be I might not have minded so much. But check out that cover. Sure, the guy doesn’t have long hair and the girl isn’t busting out of her corset, but there is a definite romance novel vibe to it. Add that to the fact that the book is about romance novel size, and you have a real problem of false expectations (the first 900 pages notwithstanding). So yeah, this is my constructive criticism for Simon & Schuster. In the updated printings, you could work on that.
