u/LHS1895

I just finished a second read-through of Lonesome Dove, and as I was poking around online, I found a number of complaints about the book that followed it in the tetralogy, Streets of Laredo, specifically that it was bleak and disappointing seemingly just to be bleak and disappointing. There was some conversation about McMurtry's post-surgery depression possibly having an effect on his writing as well.

I read Streets of Laredo maybe five or six months ago and thought it was excellent and a fine follow-up to Lonesome Dove, and I was surprised at how negatively people felt about the writing and characterization itself (though I get not enjoying it because it's too bleak from a personal taste standpoint).

However, I want to focus this post on the way that three characters from LD are handled in Streets of Laredo: >!Newt Dobbs, July Johnson, and Clara Allen!<. Many (maybe most) of the complaints that I see about the book center on these characters' fates, but I think that the way they are handled in SoL makes sense based on where we left them back in LD.

>!Newt: !<>!Deceased because he is killed by the Hell Bitch.!< The last fifty or so pages of Lonesome Dove are a dissection of what makes Woodrow Call such an emotionally unavailable mess and how being emotionally abusive or unavailable can have real-life physical consequences for the people around you. >!Newt badly wants Call to acknowledge that Call is his father, but Call cannot be honest with Newt or himself about that (or about how he felt about Newt's mother Maggie), so instead, he replaces emotional honesty with physical gifts, including the Hell Bitch, a horse that the previous eight hundred-ish pages had established as an exceedingly clever and dangerous horse who at the very start of the book had injured Call himself.!< Call even wishes that he had >!the Hell Bitch!< with him as he makes the journey back to Texas at one point, and he would have IF he had been able to just say, >!"Newt, I'm your father and I'm proud of what kind of man you're becoming."!<

It makes sense to me that>! Newt would use the Hell Bitch out of respect for Call even if he wasn't yet ready to handle a horse like that, and it makes sense that the Hell Bitch would take advantage of having a more inexperienced handler and kill someone!<. But also thematically, it is a perfect example of how Call's fatal character flaw - that he is emotionally constipated to a harmful degree - would affect his son. Clara's fury at Call at the end of LD essentially accuses him of this very thing; she's right, and Newt's fate proves it.

>!July!<: Maybe I'm being uncharitable about him, but he's a dolt. He's able to survive in a developed-enough small city with an army fort in it, but the second he leaves, he's hapless physically, and he's hapless emotionally well before that. LD points out that his aptitude for the work he's doing on Clara's land is poor, and what do you know, >!the guy who loves but doesn't understand anything about Elmira also fails to win the heart Clara, who he loves but doesn't understand!< and then >!gets killed trying to move horses across a river!<. This is almost certainly an imperfect comparison, but this character reminds me a lot of Ed Tom Bell except that the latter is actually competent in that neither of them quite grasp the danger of the world around them, though they both are left with a sense of unease and dislocation by that danger.

>!Clara!<: It's interesting to me that>! Clara can spot all the ways that Bob was not at all like her!<, but she didn't seem to understand the one way they were alike - a stubbornness that borders on carelessness and a willingness to ignore warnings from others - and it ends up that they both >!are killed by horses they're keeping!< as a result. I could write a whole book about >!Clara!<, who well might be the most interesting character in LD in some ways. People love her, understandably, but she's got a number of gaping blind spots about herself even though she can quickly dissect other people's motives, flaws, and needs, and that's what makes her character's fate interesting in SoL (and her character interesting in general).

I just had to get these thoughts down having finished LD again, but I'd love to know what other people think if they've read both books. Hopefully, I didn't spoil anyone on anything!