I’m continuing my quest to read the entirety of Larry McMurtry’s works. In The Last Kind Words Saloon, McMurtry returns to the late nineteenth century American West of Lonesome Dove. This is a sequel of sorts to Telegraph Days but with a different cast of characters with only an occasional mention of Nellie Courtright, though the book ends with her. Legendary Texas cowman, Charlie Goodnight, teams up with an Englishman, Lord Ernle, to open a cattle ranch in Palo Duro Canyon in the Texas Panhandle, but their venture fails. Providing an acerbic commentary throughout are two equally legendary men, Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. The book follows them from Long Grass, Texas (the next town over from Rita Blanca in Telegraph Days) and on to Tombstone and the events leading to the infamous shootout at the OK corral.
The dialogue is sparse but revealing. McMurtry captures the separation of the sexes so well and shows how men and women frequently work at odds to each other. The men are being displaced by modernity. They’re so disconnected from their own emotions—not to mention those of their women—that it’s a wonder they can function. Wyatt spends most of his time drunk, but doesn’t drink at the bar where his wife, Jessie, works. She needles him “mainly just to have something happening.” Goodnight’s wife, Mary, is askance at learning he expects her to live in a tent on his new ranch, and says, “I didn’t learn algebra just to live in a tent.”
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The Last Kind Words Saloon (Liveright, May 7, 2014) is available through:
Your local independent bookseller | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
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You can read my reviews of other McMurtry books here:
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