Page 99: What It Says About Lonesome Dove

The Times (London) includes a feature called "Page 99" in its book section every week that I've come to find works very effectively to give a real sense of what a particular book is all about, especially as to its style and overall readability. The editor in charge always introduces the  piece puts it this way:

    "Ford Madox Ford, friend of Joseph Conrad, novelist and literary critic, said: 'Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.' Arbitrary, perhaps, but surprisingly accurate."

In that spirit, I've shamelessly stolen the idea (whether from Ford Madox Ford or from The Times, I'm not sure) to see how it works on a couple of the books I'm reading at the moment. First up, a portion of the ninety-ninth page of Larry McMurtry's absolutely brilliant western novel, Lonesome Dove:

    "Wilbarger of course was a surprise. He trotted his big black horse right up to the porch, which surprised the blue pigs as much as it did Augustus. They woke up and grunted at the horse.

    Wilbarger looked enviously at Augustus's jug. 'By God, I bet that ain't persimmon juice you're drinking,' he said. 'I wish I could afford an easy life.'

    'If you was to dismount and stop scaring my pigs you'd be welcome to a drink,' Augustus said. 'We can introduce ourselves later.'

    The shoat got up and walked right under the black horse, which was well broke enough that it didn't move. Wilbarger was more shocked than the horse. In fact, Augustus was shocked himself. The shoat had never done such a thing before, though he had always been an unpredictable shoat.

    'I guess that's one of the pigs you don't rent,' Wilbarger said. 'If I'd been riding my mare she'd have kicked it so far you'd have had to hunt to find your bacon.'

    'Well, that pig had been asleep,' Augustus said. 'I guess it didn't expect a horse to be standing there when it woke up.'

    'Which are you, Call or McCrae?' Walberger asked, tired of discussing pigs.

    'I'm McCrae,' Augustus said. 'Call wouldn't put up with this much jabbering.'

    'Can't blame him,' Walberger said. 'I'm Walberger.'

That's a taste of my favorite novel of all-time. I'm reading Lonesome Dove for the third time right now - all 843 pages of it - and it still makes me laugh and seems as fresh as it did the first time I read it back in 1985. It's only one of half-a-dozen books I'm reading at the moment, so I'm limiting myself to one or two chapters a day, and I'm finding that may be the best way of all to experience the Augustus McCrae/Woodrow Call saga. After all, I really don't want it to end...and have just reached page 99. 

Larry McMurtry

Still Life: The First Inspector Gamache Novel - Take One

I was not one of those lucky readers who discovered Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache books when the first one was published back in 2005. I, in fact, did not become acquainted with the inspector until 2010 when I somehow stumbled upon that year’s addition to the series (book number six) Bury Your Dead.I really liked that one, but I didn’t make the effort to check out Penny’s backlist or even to read book seven when it was published in 2011. And I never even realized that a Gamache novella, The Hangman, was published in late 2010. But then I lucked into an ARC of The Beautiful Mysteryin 2012, and that one was so good that I could not wait for the next Gamache to be published in 2013 – but I still missed it and haven’t read it to this day. 

I’ve done much better since my haphazard approach to the series first began, though, and have read The Long Way Home (2014), The Nature of the Beast (2015), A Great Reckoning (2016), Glass Houses(2017), and Kingdom of the Blind (2018) not long after each was published. So, although I feel like I know the good inspector and the residents of Three Pines pretty well at this point, I still have this huge gap in my reading: the first five books, the eighth book, and the novella. And just a few days ago, the fifteenth novel in the Gamache series, A Better Man, was published, so there’s that. So, what better time to go back and read Still Life, the book that started it all?

Louise Penny

I’m about 25% of the way through Still Life right now, and it’s settling into the murder investigation that comprises the novel’s main plotline. Reading this one so far out of sequence as I am is proving to be a bit like going back in time via a real life time-machine. It has been a such a great treat to see Gamache and the Three Pines residents all show up in the book’s first thirty pages that I found myself making notes about when they all first appeared and how Penny described them that first time. 

Some of the things I learned in the first fifty or so pages of Still Lifesurprised me, some didn’t:

·      Gamache was introduced on the book’s first page as being in his mid-fifties and suffering somewhat of a stalled career (I had wrongly assumed that he was a much younger man when the series opened and that his career would have been on a markedly upward path.)

·      The next two characters introduced are the artists Clara and Peter Morrow. (Knowing what comes much later for one of them makes this introduction seem a poignant one.) 

·      Ruth Zardo is the next to be mentioned, but only briefly. (She is my favorite of the Three Pines cast.)

·      Next up are the gay couple who run the bistro, Olivier and Gabri – who play a key role in kicking off the plot twists in Still Life.

·      Then comes bookstore owner Myrna Landers who is described as a colorfully dressed, heavyset, former psychologist who also just happens to be black (her race is thrown in almost as an afterthought; I liked that approach).

·      In what is almost a throwaway sentence, Penny makes reference to the source of Gamache’s career troubles, something called the “Arnot case.”

·      Gamache had never heard of Three Pines despite it being only minutes away from his Montreal home, and he would have never discovered its existence had he not been called there to investigate a murder.

·      Gamache has already been working with Jean Guy Beauvoir for ten years.

·      The origin of the Three Pines name is explained early on, although I remember it being repeated in at least one much later novel (which makes sense).

·      The first meeting between Ruth Zardo and Gamache is an absolute hoot, and in addition to what it reveals about both of them, it explains some of the good-natured verbal sparring between the two that happens in succeeding books.

·      Gamache has had the same rank for the past twelve years but it really doesn’t bother him all that much. He is a happy man, and he and his wife have a very special relationship.

It will, of course, be interesting to watch all of these characters and their various interpersonal relationships develop but going back to this “origin story” is really fun. It makes me wonder if I would have even noticed half the things I’ve noted here if I had not already read half of the series. So, I guess my takeaway from this experience (realizing it may not work this way for everyone) is that if you come to a long series somewhere in the middle of it, or even later, don’t despair because that might be a good thing in the long run. It certainly has been for me in the case of the Inspector Gamache books. 

Lonesome Dove, A Prayer for Owen Meany, & Spooner - First Paragraphs Sell a Book

I got to thinking this morning about some of my favorite books and how vivid they still are in my mind despite the fact that it has been decades, in some cases, since I've read them.  That made me curious as to exactly what would pop into my head by reading the first pages of a few of them.  And that in turn made me realize just how brilliant some of those first few sentences are.

A book right up at the top of my "Favorites" list is Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove.  I love everything about that book: the relationship between Augustus McCrae and W.F. Call; the book's contrasting laugh-out-loud humorous episodes and tear-jerking tragedies; the numerous supporting characters who are so important to the story; and the inclusion of one of the darkest literary villains I've ever encountered, the infamous Blue Duck. But I didn't know any of that would happen to me until I had turned the last of the 843 pages following this short-but-truly-sweet opening paragraph:

"When Augustus came out on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake - and not a very big one.  It had probably just been crawling around looking for shade when it ran into the pigs.  They were having a fine tug-of-war with it, and its rattling days were over.  The sow had it by the neck, and the shoat had the tail."

Another favorite author of mine is John Irving, and one of my favorite John Irving books is A Prayer for Owen Meany.  And now that I think about it, this one shares a lot of the characteristics I love so much in Lonesome Dove, primarily of course, the remarkable friendship between the book's two main characters.  Irving's opening Owen Meany paragraph sets the stage well for what is to come:

"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice - not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.  I make no claims to have a life in Christ, or with Christ - and certainly not for Christ, which I've heard some zealots claim.  I'm not very sophisticated in my knowledge of the Old Testament, and I've not read the New Testament since my Sunday school days, except for those passages that I hear read aloud to me when I go to church.  I'm somewhat more familiar with the passages from the Bible that appear in The Book of Common Prayer.  I read my prayer book often, and my Bible only on holy days - the prayer book is so much more orderly."

Pete Dexter (another longtime favorite) has written some truly wonderful novels, and sometimes I think that Spooner is as underrated as it is because everyone prefers to talk about others of his like Paris Trout, Deadwood, or maybe The Paperboy.  But next to Deadwood, this one from 2009 is my favorite, probably because I find it so funny and just so damned clever.  Note again, that this is another book about a lifelong relationship between two very different people (this time, a boy and his step-father). It starts like this:

"Spooner was born a few minutes previous to daybreak in the historic honeysuckle little town of Milledgeville, Georgia, in a makeshift delivery room put together in the waiting area of the medical offices of Dr. Emil Woods, across the street from and approximately in the crosshairs of a cluster of Confederate artillery pieces guarding the dog-spotted front lawn of the Greene Street Sons of the Confederacy Retirement Home.  It was the first Saturday of December 1956, and the old folks' home was on fire." 

 A good first paragraph is one of the most important tools an author has available to grab my book-browsing attention - usually quickly and in less than 100 words.  I can learn more about the style and readability of an author from an opening paragraph than I will ever gather from a canned dust jacket summary or some blurb from a fellow author of the writer's that I wouldn't believe in a million years anyway.  That old you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours trick doesn't fool me anymore.

The three I've reproduced above worked perfectly for/on me.  I would likely have ended up with all three of the books on my shelves anyway because I was already a fan of these three authors before first setting eyes on these three particular novels - but even if I had been a reader being exposed to McMurtry, Irving, or Dexter for the first time, I'm pretty sure that the books would have come home with me.

Favorite Novels: News of the World - Paulette Jiles

I met Paulette Jiles at the San Antonio Book Festival in 2016 where I heard her speak about her upcoming new novel, News of the World. From the beginning, the premise of the novel intrigued me, and when I found out that it was all based on real life Texas characters, I knew I had to read it. It was only when I went to buy a copy from Paulette that I realized that the book was not yet for sale. After a few minutes of conversation about the book and history of that part of our state, Paulette graciously offered me a review copy of the book, and it has been one of my favorite novels ever since.  

I said it in July 2016 when I wrote the review shown below: News of the World is a beautiful novel, and it deserves to find a huge audience.  I re-read the book a few weeks ago, and I feel more strongly than ever about that...but let Paulette herself make the case that this is a very special novel.

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What could possibly be more intriguing a main character in a book about Reconstruction Era Texas than a seventy-year-old retired Army captain who makes his living as a traveling “professional reader”?  Perhaps a ten-year-old little girl who has spent the last four years of her life as a captive of the band of Kiowa who butchered her parents and little sister in front of her might just do it.  And then if you have these two characters cross paths, as Paulette Jiles does in News of the World, you have the makings of what is certain to be one of the most memorable novels of 2016. 

People in north Texas are hungry for news, and they will pay to hear it.  Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd is only too happy to bring it to them as he travels from town to town reading articles aloud from the latest East Coast newspapers he can get hold of – all for the price of one thin dime per listener.  It is, in fact, the kind of solitary existence that Captain Kidd much prefers at this stage of his life.  But that all changes one trip through Wichita Falls when Kidd reluctantly agrees to transport a little girl back to the aunt and uncle she has not seen since being captured by the Kiowa.  The 400-mile trip from Wichita Falls to near San Antonio will prove to be a dangerous one, one that will forever bind the old man and the little girl together.

Paulette Jiles

There is plenty of old fashioned western action in News of the World: threatening Indians, shootouts with bad guys who want to steal the little girl for their own purposes, rising waters and dangerous river crossings, big-hearted women of the evening, etc., and all of it is well handled by Jiles.  But what makes the novel special is the relationship that develops between Captain Kidd and young Johanna as they steadily make their way southward.  Johanna has forgotten everything about her life before the Kiowa took her.  No longer does she speak English or German; she has forgotten how to use a knife and a fork; and she considers the idea of wearing a cloth dress to be a ludicrous one.  She is now, and in her mind forever will be, a Kiowa Indian.  White men – and women – terrify her, and she wants nothing to do with them.

But Johanna senses something in Captain Kidd that calms her, a level of trust that moves her to call him “grandfather” in her own language.  Soon, though, their relationship has gone way beyond merely honoring the Captain with a title, and Johanna begins thinking of Kidd as her grandfather in the truest sense of the word.  And perhaps surprising even himself, Kidd grows so fond of the little girl that he would willingly give his own life to save hers.

News of the World is a beautiful novel, and it deserves to find a huge audience.

(Review Copy provided by Publisher)