It's what makes them so appealing. The cruising is endless and serves only to connect the short, affectionate, sometimes hilarious vignettes of Americans trading and swapping that give the book its genuine eccentricity. If there is a novel to be written about trail-driving that will be lasting and deep without being about brave men . For now, for the Great Cowboy Novel, 'Lonesome Dove' will do. Mr. McMurtry has been there and he knows what he is talking about.
Few novels are. . . .
But it doesn't matter. When a writer is as good as Mr. McMurtry is, even a relatively minor book is a major event. Mr. McMurtry's prose stands up and kicks fence posts. His cowboys are articulate, his petty criminals have grand potential, and in his latest book, 'Some Can Whistle,' even a rich novelist is as complex as Hamlet, and as doomed. Mr. McMurtry's is sentimentality laced with comic irony, and it works very well.