"What you have to understand is that Woodrow Call is a peculiar man."

Last week I finished reading Middlemarch, and immediately after I began reading Lonesome Dove, which I finished today. In some ways it's hard to imagine two novels more different. The one is mannered (not to say repressed), takes place almost entirely in one small village, and focuses on the domestic sphere; the other is vulgar, takes place mostly in the midst of travel, and, well, it's a cowboy book. There are people getting shot up, carved up, and worse left and right. Aside from Causabon and Mr. Raffles, I can't think of any deaths in Middlemarch, and none of them are violent.

All that said, I was struck by the similarities, and if I was still taking literature courses I'd be clamoring to write a comparison paper. McMurtry's language may be more blunt than Eliot's (and a tad more accessible, at least to me), but their approaches are similar enough that I suspect the similarities are not accidental. Googling, I find a book called Larry McMurtry and the Victorian Novel, which probably means that anything I say here has been said better already. Don't mind me; I'm just thinking out loud.

The biggest thing, to me, is that both books favor long digressive passages exploring the psychology and thinking behind the behavior of the characters, passages which--for the most part, anyway--do a surprisingly good job of deepening the impact of actions and events. I say surprisingly because my instincts as a writer are to do as little of this as possible. It breaks that Show-Don't-Tell rule that we all hear so much of, and yet it does it so well that it almost reinforces the common sense of the rule. Reading Eliot and McMurtry get away with this just drives home how incredibly difficult it is to do these things and do them well. In most cases we may be better off not even trying, taking another approach entirely. (Among other reasons, working this way apparently results in 900-page books.) But when it works--wow.

Another similarity is the reticence of the characters. Cowboys were Victorians, in a sense, and they're not that different from the citizens of Middlemarch in certain respects. They may not have a problem talking about dinguses or carrots or rods or whatever slang word for penis McMurtry is using this chapter, but when it comes to feelings they're quick to clam up, or to pretend they're not there. Pea Eye is so far removed from any sort of emotional vulnerability that he can't even figure out why he'd want to get married, and while most of the men moon over Lorie they're largely unable to do more than stare. One impressive thing about Middlemarch was how skillfully Eliot maneuvered her characters into situations where they were forced to say things which were supposed to go unsaid, to clear up the misunderstandings that grew between people who were nearly prohibited from express intimate thoughts. But her characters are almost laid back compared to McMurtry's cowboys.

Lonesome Dove takes a pretty dim view of romantic love, dismissing it as a cloak for male lust or a lie that people tell themselves. Dish's love for Lorie, or July Johnson's for Clara, parallel Rosamond's love for Lydgate; the difference is that Lorie and Clara are smart enough not to be taken in by that sort of admiration. Clara, though, is an exception in that she has no patience for those--particularly men--who can't express what they feel, who are in a sense emotionally retarded. She's particularly hard on July and on Call, who can't bring himself to acknowledge Newt for fear of acknowledging the hurt that the single moment of emotional vulnerability in his life has caused. Call doesn't see feeling as weakness, exactly, but he sees the way people hurt each other, more often than not, when they allow themselves to become entangled. Call's life is too controlled and orderly to allow that to happen. (He is very like Causabon in this way, enough so that I can't believe it's not intentional.)

It's interesting that Clara can't bring herself to accept Gus when they both serve to stir up other people, to state uncomfortable truths and to challenge people to say what they really feel. Perhaps Gus is too much the trickster figure, or perhaps Clara feels herself too unsettled already to try living with a force like Gus. I think Gus and Dorothea would have made a good couple, in some crossover world. (Maybe Fred Vincy and Dash for the slashers.)

Language-wise, though, Lonesome Dove has got it all over Middlemarch. Every time Gus opens his mouth it makes me smile. It doesn't hurt that I see him as Robert Duvall, who played him in the miniseries. I've, uh, seen that five times. At least. Glad to have finally read the book.