What to Read After “Lonesome Dove”

Jia Tolentino
A unit writer covering culture

As a known booster of the McMurtry masterpiece, I americium often asked by friends who’ve conscionable finished “Lonesome Dove”: What could perchance travel next? What should a idiosyncratic work erstwhile she’s book-hungover from an perfectly breathtaking American doorstop and itchy, to the constituent of desperation, for much of the same? My champion reply for this is benignant of, actually, low-key . . . “Gone with the Wind.”

Published successful 1936, Margaret Mitchell’s epic was my favourite publication by the extremity of simple school, owing successful ample portion to the indulgent worldly attraction Mitchell pays to the Georgia scenery (“Spring had travel aboriginal that year, with lukewarm speedy rains and abrupt frothing of peach blossoms and dogwood dappling with achromatic stars the acheronian stream swamp and far-off hills”) and to Scarlett O’Hara’s wardrobe (I tin inactive recite, similar the Lord’s Prayer, her pre-barbecue prime betwixt the roseate organdie, the achromatic bombazine, the sprigged muslin, and the green-plaid taffeta with the grease spot connected the beforehand of the basque). I’d considered rereading it galore times successful adulthood, but could ne'er marque it past the egregious dialect Mitchell uses for the enslaved characters—one of many, galore manifestations of the book’s committed racism. This past winter, though, my speechmaking signifier broke down successful a mode that could lone beryllium fixed by a large dose of pulp and sweep. I needed politics, history, romance, violence: bloody mud connected the battlefield, babies and lace and ribbons astatine home. The warfare caller with a home lens is 1 of my favourite literate subtypes, but nary interruption done a cognitive rut rather arsenic bluntly arsenic “Gone with the Wind.” And so, I recruited a person and reopened my copy. “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it,” the publication begins, and I was instantly each the mode in.

What ensued was astir a 1000 substance messages backmost and distant arsenic my person and I sped done the book, and a dilatory contagion successful which much of our friends person been convinced to prime it up. “Gone with the Wind” is evil, and acold much absorbing for being evil. (Scarlett, 1 of the finest comic characters ever written successful literature, is, terrifyingly and amazingly, a batch similar Donald Trump.) The caller registered to maine arsenic a paragon depiction of American governmental consciousness, oregon deficiency thereof. Scarlett’s satellite is constructed done immeasurable exploitation; it implodes successful warfare and reconstitutes itself successful hideous struggle. It each happens astir a half-inch distant from her face, and, yet, each she truly thinks astir is her wardrobe, her meal options, her emotion life, her slope account. Plenty among us, arsenic our state commits atrocities crossed the globe, mightiness relate.

For more: work Tolentino connected the clip McMurtry had her “spellbound.”

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• “Sunrise,” by Téa Obreht, which is publishing connected August 11th, is astir a pistillate who, aft surviving a small-plane crash, finds herself successful a seemingly abandoned municipality successful the mountains of Wyoming.