Review by New York Times Review
WONDERFUL TITLE. Head-scratcher of a novel. If a reviewer is tempted to write in laconic, drawling phrases, with pauses now and then for a sip of something amber, that's because Larry McMurtry possesses one of the most engaging, tempting-to-imitate voices in contemporary American fiction, a voice so smooth and mellow you can almost hear the ice clink against the glass as he talks. "The Last Kind Words Saloon" - the title comes from the sign one of the Earp brothers carries from town to town - is McMurtry's first novel in five years. Ostensibly the story of the gunfighters Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, it seems very much an echo of McMurtry's 1985 Pulitzer Prize winner, "Lonesome Dove." But that splendid novel, based on real-life incidents, was generous in scale and invention; this short, rather stunted tale is grounded not in history, precisely, but in what McMurtry unhelpfully distinguishes as "legend," out of which he says he has created "a ballad in prose." Maybe not the best decision. The actual historical characters made a strange, unsavory but fascinating pair. Wyatt Earp was a drifter, gambler, occasional lawman, occasional gunman, quite possibly a horse thief and con man. In 1877, in a saloon in Texas, he met the occasional dentist Dr. John Henry Holliday - a frail, moody, alcoholic, violently unstable Georgian who had come west seeking a climate that might stave off his slow, certain death from tuberculosis. Why they became friends lies deep in the mysteries of human personality, though one answer may be that the relatively good-hearted and stable Earp simply saw that Holliday needed him. In McMurtry's new version, they threaten to become little more than wisecracking buddies on the road. Using the storyteller's time-honored device of a contrasting duo - for novelists it begins with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza - he offers us a hard, taciturn Earp and a genial, talkative Doc, but with no real physical contrast and little real difference in manner or voice. In a genuinely witty turn, however, he makes the feared gunslinger Earp a baffled, sometimes henpecked husband whose wife, Jessie, like all of McMurtry's women, is strong, fiery and far more interesting than the men. (Earp's actual wife was named Josephine, and he didn't meet her till he arrived in Tombstone, where she was the mistress of the local sheriff.) A parallel story line follows the adventures of a real-life cattle rancher named Charlie Goodnight, and from time to time other characters ride along for a chapter or two - a cartoonish English lord and his exotic mistress, two murderous Kiowas, Nellie Courtright from McMurtry's 2006 novel, "Telegraph Days." Most of them are maddeningly unconnected to the main story. Some cameo figures, like Buffalo Bill, had no known contact with Earp or Holliday. Others, like Johnny-Behind-the-Deuce, merely saunter in for the preliminaries to the O.K. Corral, though that famous gunfight is recorded here in the least dramatic fashion possible, a dry, anticlimactic statement of fact that takes not quite a third of a page to describe. There are other frustrations. Dialogue can be painfully stilted. ("Could you direct me to the newspaper office? I'm a reporter, you see.") Some characters, like poor General Sherman, are so flat you could slip them under an editor's door. The short, stroboscopic chapters often close with a portentous one-sentence paragraph: "At that he pulled his pistol, so as to make sure it was loaded." But the effect is undercut by the fact that so many of them end with the decidedly unportentous cliché of someone abruptly turning his back and walking (or riding) away. A temptation, alas, for many readers as well. MAX BYRD'S most recent novel is "The Paris Deadline."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 22, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
Many famous western characters make cameos in McMurtry's first novel in five years, which continues in the farcical vein of the Berrybender series. An English lord, accompanied by his beautiful mistress, teams up with Charles Goodnight to found a vast cattle ranch near Palo Duro Canyon, Texas and fails. Observing Goodnight from the sidelines are two wisecracking ne'er-do-wells, Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, who, after a brief stint with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, drift down to Tombstone, where Wyatt's brothers, Virgil and Warren, have taken up the law and saloon-keeping, respectively. Other than Goodnight, Wyatt is the only developed character: he's a wife beater and alcoholic with a quick temper. He picks a fight with the Clantons, an ignorant but mostly harmless bunch, and kills them in a paragraph. The famous O.K. Corral fight is rendered as a heartless parody. Maybe McMurtry's version is truer than all the romanticized ones, but Gus McCrae from Lonesome Dove will roll in his grave. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: This might not be exactly what Lonesome Dove fans would like, but the first novel from McMurtry in five years will have his audience eager for anything.--Mort, John Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
McMurtry of Lonesome Dove fame returns to fiction (after Custer) with this uneven portrayal of the frontier friendship between Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. McMurtry is a master of colorful character development and snappy dialogue, both nicely showcased here as Wyatt and Doc meander through Texas and Colorado to Arizona, drinking, gambling, whoring, and debating whether or not they ought to shoot folks who annoy them. As these two lethal saddle pals wander the West, McMurtry introduces other real-life figures in side-plots-cattleman Charlie Goodnight; Quanah, the Comanche chief; Satanta, the Kiowa chief; and Buffalo Bill, whose adventures provide some action and humor, but add little to the Earp-Holliday story. McMurtry portrays Doc as a cuddly, funny drunk, but Wyatt is handled much differently. Here Wyatt is depicted as a moody, jealous wife beater, short-tempered and itching to pick a fight with anybody-especially Old Man Clanton and his cattle-thieving family in Tombstone, Ariz. When Wyatt stirs up a fight with the Clantons, an ambush, murder, and a challenge result in deadly powder burning at the O.K. Corral. This whole choppy story leads up to the predictable shoot-out, but McMurtry's treatment of the Old West's most famous gunfight is abrupt and unconvincing, taking just eight uninspired sentences to describe. This revisionist western plays loose with historical facts, and is a disappointing effort from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
McMurtry's first novel in five years is a brief series of vignettes featuring Western favorites Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp as well as characters such as Buffalo Bill Cody and Nellie Courtright from McMurtry's Telegraph Days. Legendary events, including the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, are packed in as well but are described as semicomic nonevents, not epic showdowns. This funny novel does include a good deal of ribald humor, but those seeking the genre's typical plotty action will come up short. The audio treatment is excellent, and narrator Tom Stechschulte has one of the best voices for Westerns. His cadences and lilts breathe life into the otherwise flat characters. VERDICT Recommended to McMurty or Earp and Holliday completists, or those looking for a quick taste of McMurtry's distinctive prose. ["By turns droll, stark, wry, or raunchy, this peripatetic novel is a bit sketchy at times," read the review of the Liveright: Norton hc, LJ 2/15/14.]-Mark John Swails, Johnson Cty. Community Coll., Overland Park, KS (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
