Beauty is Imperfection

When I was young, I hated cowboy stories and all things Western. So it took me a while to get around to reading a fat fiction book on the subject, Lonesome Dove. When I got over my snobbery, I found a gloriously written, brutal work of myth-busting and harsh neorealism about the west and Texas. Here we find a lot of limited and brutish characters driven by pure existential need to pursue the dangerous folly of a cattle drive when they didn’t really have to and they all suffer horrific fates over it. There’s only a couple of women in town and everybody’s in love with the same one. It’s hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys. You start to get into the psychology of the characters and emphasize with them and then the author kills many of the best ones. I was emotionally drained by the end of it. No small feat for me, since I was more attached to the distant and cool scientific satires of Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon at the time I finally read Larry McMurtry’s wonderful book.

If that weren’t enough, McMurtry also gave us the book The Last Picture Show,” which developed with his help into one of the best American movies of the 1970s and he co-wrote Brokeback Mountain. Like his best works, these poked holes in the myths we build about sexuality, masculinity, patriarchy and the past.