The Anti-Western?

Social media, I am told, is all abuzz these days with Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Lonesome Dove. While I lack even a passing acquaintance with the online exchanges, I have it on good authority that the book is experiencing a resurgence, heaped with praise all the way up to and including being christened the greatest book of all time.

Much of the discussion revolves around Lonesome Dove being declared by some the “anti-Western.” I’m not sure what that means. It may have to do with the idea that McMurtry attempts to present a realistic portrayal of the Old West, warts and all—a departure from the romanticized, glorified version popularized by Owen Wister, Zane Grey, Louis Lamour, and others, continuing right up to our time. (Not that those good-versus-evil tales with their necessary triumph of the good-guy hero are unusual in literature. The same pattern holds true at least as far back as Homer and the legends of King Arthur, and continues in cozy mysteries, thrillers, fantasies, private-eye novels, Westerns, and even much of literary fiction.) But somehow, calling Lonesome Dove the “anti-Western” gives supercilious readers permission to read a Western novel—something their refined, sophisticated tastes would not allow otherwise.

But there is nothing new in Lonesome Dove’s attempt to present a raw, unvarnished version of the Old West. It has been done before and since, many times. Andy Adams tried it in 1903 in The Log of a Cowboy, a trail drive novel that, unlike Lonesome Dove, grew out of the author’s personal experiences.
Paso Por Aqui, penned by Eugene Manlove Rhodes in 1925, cannot be written off as glamorizing its subject. Nor can The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, which has been turning the mythical Old West on its head since 1940. Glendon Swarthout’s The Shootist (not the movie, which pulls Swarthout’s punches) breaks all the expectations of the triumph of good over evil. True Grit by Charles Portis also represents a departure.

A previous Pulitzer Prize-winning novel set in the Old West, Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner, presents a realistic view borrowed from the experiences of real-life Western transplant Mary Hallock Foote.

It would be difficult to depart from the romantic view further than Cormac McCarthy does in Blood Meridian and The Crossing, or E.L. Doctorow in Welcome to Hard Times. Loren D. Estleman’s Bloody Season demonstrates the dubious distinctions between heroes and villains. And while a glamorized view of the Old West peeks through in Ivan Doig’s Dancing at the Rascal Fair and The Meadow by James Galvin, it is portrayed through the eyes of some characters, and is countered by the notions of other characters.

Are these examples—and others out there—“anti-Westerns,” or are they merely Western literature, sharing the stage with the broad range of plots, points of view, and approaches that make reading good books of any genre a joy? I cast my vote for the latter. To me, Lonesome Dove is not “anti-Western” at all, but “pro” good reading and a great Western novel.