Saturday, January 18, 2025

Last night, as I was making dinner, Tom moseyed into the kitchen and mentioned that he would be home on Monday--a first, as MLK Day has never been a paid day off for him before. Suddenly, we've got another little blip of a holiday together . . . three whole mornings of not caring about the alarm clock, of peaceable coffee drinking, of nowhere-to-go-in-a-hurry blinks and yawns: a holiday from all of those travels--Vermont, Brooklyn, Monson crammed into the tight fold between the old and new years.

I'm not sure what we'll do with ourselves today. T's getting a haircut this morning, I need to buy groceries, but we may try to go ice skating before the rain and snow move in tonight and tomorrow. I'll have to work some this weekend: that judging stack is too thick for procrastination, but at least I can read writing samples on the couch by the fire.

For the past few days I've been rereading Larry McMurtry's novel Buffalo Girls. In my opinion he is vastly underrated as a writer. Yes, he won the Pulitzer for Lonesome Dove, but who speaks of him as a great artist? And yet he has enormous and sharp-eyed empathy, deep historical clarity; he is a masterful purveyor of the human comedy and its sorrows, and his dialogue is as brilliant as Dickens's. Buffalo Girls is a tale of the end of the Wild West, after Little Bighorn, after the Gold Rush, after the buffalo slaughter, as Buffalo Bill Cody is rounding up the old-timers to join his traveling show. One of the main characters is Calamity Jane, and McMurtry's delineation of her complex gender fluidity is delicate and expressive--especially notable in a novel that was first published in 1990, decades before the subject was a common matter of discussion.

Larry McMurtry wrote many, many books, and they're not all equally good. But I would argue that, at his best, he is one of the great novelists of the twentieth century. I go back to his work again and again, with pleasure and sorrow and awe.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Agree about McMurtry's work.