Customer Reviews

Boone's Lick

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(12)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I've been a reader of McMurtry's novels for years--I've always enjoyed his storytelling, but what I've seen over the years is a paring down of the details in his stories so that narrative and description of place are becoming displaced by the voice of the protagonists--who are not omnicient, but simply tell the story of themselves in circumstances over which they have no control.

Boone's Lick is a beautiful, simple novel. No--it's not Lonesome Dove and Lonesome Dove fans should not judge Boone's Lick based on their love of only one of McMurtry's novels.

McMurtry went through a dry period which included junk like the sequel to Terms of Endearment (I can't even remember the title of the book, it was so substandard), but I have been moved by both Duane's Dead, and now, Boone's Lick.

Readers who expect a great narrative will be disappointed by this novel. But those who expect subtle character development through the voice of a simple, gentle character to tell a story of the old west will be pleased. I'd advise any reader to be patient, and continue on--by the last 75 pages, I was unable to put the book down and wept at the end.

No one writes a better Western Novel than Larry McMurtry. While this book does not match Lonesome Dove, it shows that he still has what it takes when it comes to a story about the old West. He can take simple situations and weave an interesting story with characters you can't help but fully visualize in your mind. My main complaint is that the story was too short. I think he could have gone deeper into the lives of many of the family members. Nonetheless, when you finish this book you'll have met a really unusual bunch of people. If you like McMurtry, I'm sure you'll enjoy this one.

There is no question this is a slight novel. With McMurtry's western novels, we usually get epic sweep, grand accomplishments, tragedy, massacre's, etc. etc. They are usually fabulously entertaining books, with the LONESOME DOVE saga and the BERRYBENDER CHRONICLES being the best examples. But they are not easy reads. They pull at the heart, make us grimace with pain, etc.

BOONE'S LICK is like an antedote for these books. Many of its themes are similar...the men who are ignorant of "civilized life," the elderly Native Americans who assist the whites, the end of the buffalo, the hardships and bad-luck of traveling across the west, etc. But there is a lightness of tone (and far less tragedy) then McMurtry's other books. It is not a towering achievement, by any stretch, but I found it to be fun, fast reading and still enlightening.

It basically tells the story of one woman's trip across dangerous country to confront her frequently absent, no-good husband. In tow she brings her two teenage sons, a teenage daughter, a baby, her husband's brother (who has always loved her), her sister and her elderly father...along with a bunch of mules. They pick up some other companions along the way too.

The first half of the book mostly establishes the characters and their amusing relationships in the town of Boone's Lick, Missouri. (A younger Wild Bill Hickock is an important character in this part of the book). When they suddenly hit the road (all but the mother VERY reluctantly), we follow them more or less across the Oregon Trail. Although some misfortune befalls them, the body count is low for McMurtry. There are amusing misunderstandings, befuddlements, and such, but little to be sad about.

I'm perplexed by the reviewers here who say the book is boring. It's very fast paced...just not very deep. But it paints an authentic feeling, and has some characters that, while they won't stay with you forever like Gus and Call from LONESOME DOVE, are certainly worth getting to know. I recommend the book for fans of McMurtry's style, but who don't want to plunge into a full-blown epic. It's also a book that I think younger readers might enjoy...very little of the usual sex and extremely graphic violence.

There's nothing better than a good Western from Larry McMurtry. It's hard not to compare "Boone's Lick" to "Lonesome Dove" - both novels are named after small, depressed post-Civil War towns and evolve into journeys across the Western frontier. However, while "Lonesome Dove" was a grand epic, "Boone's Lick" is more of a novella. It follows the fates of the Cecil family - mother Mary Margaret, Uncle Seth, narrator Shay, dim-witted brother GT and assorted characters they meet along the way - as they set off across the Oregon trail to find their wayward patriarch. As always, McMurtry's characters are uniquely memorable, and he effortlessly conveys both the grandeur and the challenges of the West. McMurtry's realism is so comprehensive that he even weaves real historical characters and events into his narrative. The story itself is charming - I read it effortlessly in one sitting.

Good God, Larry McMurtry has bloodied up the West again with a story I couldn't put down. After the Civil War Mary Margaret Cecil packs up her Missouri family to find her husband who is in Wyoming freighting for the Army. This is undoubtedly the most bizarre Western that has ever been written.

Unlike other novels of the adventuresome travelers who went toward a Western star to search for treasures, the Cecils travel across an unmarked wilderness in search of the husband of Mary Margaret. Not content with a lazy wagon trip, McMurtry has thrown in the most dysfunctional bunch of people who ever followed the setting sun. A priest who swims naked across the Missouri River, Indians who are the most flea bitten of any of the savages, accompanied by a brother-in-law who worships the ground she walks on, Mary Margaret ain't the shrinking violet that you usually meet along the route to the Big Sky Country where mountains meet the sky.

And then if murdering Indians aren't enough, wait until you read about Mary Margaret finding out about her husband's wives numbers one and two. Beware, this isn't a John Wayne Western where women are women and men are men. This is a Western where one hell'uv a scorned wife destroys the myths of the Western heroes, and along her journeys, she makes even the cruel Indians cower down in fright. Luther Butler http:/www.erath.net/butler/

With his clever eye for detail and unerring ear for great dialogue, Larry McMurtry makes a welcomed return to his roots in this fine little book. Told from the perspective of its 15 year old hero, this terse Western tale brought to mine richer, more emotionally satisfying work, from the likes of Chaucer and Shakespeare. Yet on its own terms, "Boone's Lick" is a sly, often funny, look at the West in the late 1860's. Having not read "Lonesome Dove", it is impossible for me to compare this to his earlier, critically acclaimed work. Yet I found it quite captivating, showing McMurtry's great love of the West and the strong empathy he feels towards its aboriginal peoples. Anyone who thinks the Western as a literary form has run its course should read McMurtry's tome.

McMurtry's latest story is a return to what he does best; tell good western tales. Told from the perspective of fifteen-year-old Shay Cecil, this story is about a family's adventure from Missouri to Wyoming a few years following the Civil War. The Cecil family is poor and they barely make ends meet while living in a poor town called Boone's Lick, Missouri. Shay's father had gone west and has failed to return after 14 months. This prompts Shay's mother to pack up the family and head west to see what is holding him up.

Their journey isn't without danger. Raids by warmongering Indians, wild animals and the weather pose constant threats as the Cecil family goes through Kansas and Nebraska. Along the way, they pick up several colorful characters that help the family journey westward. When the family finally reaches the forts of Wyoming and their father, they realize that their father is living a double life, which poses turmoil to Shay and his mother.

McMurtry's ability to tell a solid western tale is alive and well. While the book doesn't have the depth of Lonesome Dove, it is very entertaining. I found it very hard to put down and in fact I read it in a day. While some of the events that occur left me feeling skeptical about their chances of happening, McMurtry's ability to make the reader care for his characters make this book work. Fans of McMurtry will not be disappointed.

Though few know it for a fact, many have come to suspect that Larry McMurtry has lived for almost one hundred fifty years. Despite his age, he has retained a clear memory of the people and places he has seen throughout his travels in the west. To our benefit he continues to share his observations and personal acquaintances with us.

His latest trip down a rather dusty memory lane takes us from Boone's Lick, Missouri to point's west. This is a fine example of first person storytelling, and though he must have been a child just after the civil war ended, when this story begins, his memory and attention to detail, especially dialogue is astounding. He has made these people as real for his readers as they were for him as a youngster. Once again as he did most successfully with Lonesome Dove, (and their ill advised pre- and sequels), Zeke and Ned, Anything for Billy, Buffalo Girls, and Pretty Boy Floyd he has shared with us his eclectic past.

This latest McMurtry memory is a quick, fun read as the characters tangle with each other and various forms of wild-west wild-life. The characters use all the tools at hand, guns, knives, but most often just words. The dialogue is real and amusing. The interaction between the principals is as true and alive today as when McMurtry must have first heard it spoken.

The story itself is light on its feet, not much really happens, its pace is as slow as the mules pulling the wagons west, but it's a fun ride anyway.

Just as the tiny town of Lonesome Dove was the starting point for a journey in Larry McMurtry's book of the same name, so also is Boone's Lick in this yarn by the same author.

In LONESOME DOVE, we followed the adventures of two Texas Rangers turned cattle ranchers driving a herd from the banks of the Rio Grande to Montana. In BOONE'S LICK, we have a family of sodbusters, the Cecils, traversing the plains between Missouri and Wyoming shortly after the Civil War. The family is led by the mother, Mary Margaret, whose intent is to find her husband, gone these past 14 months and presumably living at one of the Army's frontier forts, possibly with an Indian woman. Along for the ride are Mary's children (G.T., Shay, Neva, and Marcy), her brother-in-law Seth, her half-sister Rosie, and her aged Pa. Also attaching themselves to the group are an old French priest, Fr.Villy, and a native guide, Charlie Seven Days.

Whereas LONESOME DOVE was a truly epic tale, both as a book and as one of the best TV miniseries ever broadcast, BOONE'S LICK is less ambitious, but enjoyable nonetheless. The character of Seth was sufficiently similar to that of Gus McCrae in the LONESOME DOVE screenplay that I could easily imagine McRae's Robert Duvall playing the part if BOONE'S LICK is ever brought to the screen. (Picturing Duvall as Seth added considerably to my enjoyment.)

Author McMurtry's style is very similar in both stories. He doesn't downplay the hardships and dangers of cross-country travel at that time and place in American history. But he doesn't ignore rustic Western humor either. When, while traveling by riverboat, Seth remarks to Mary Margaret that one of the crew, Joel, is thinking about marrying Rosie, MM retorts, "I don't think he's aiming that high. But he's aiming." Indeed, the verbal interplay between the crusty, independent Seth and the determined, strong-willed Mary Margaret is one of the storyline's major joys.

This is not a great book by any stretch, mainly because it's a novella masquerading as a full-length novel (with a full-length novel's price tag). However, the characters are well drawn, the dialog seemingly authentic for the period, and the action believable. You can read it in a two to three hours, and it's time well spent.

This is a short, sweet little book, really nothing more than the account of one of McMurtry's classic eccentric western families as they travel west to find their pa. Some critics dwell on the fact that this book lacks the sweep and drama of "Lonesome Dove". That's so, but it also lacks that book's cruelty and tragedy. The delight here is in the details - Grandpa taking out his fiddle as soon as he meets another fiddler on the trail, the glow off the tip of a burning cheroot smoked by a prostitute as she sits on her wooden stairs on a summer night, the affection and exasperation a young boy feels for the family mules...Once again, McMurtry brings the American west alive, and this resurrection is sweeter and happier than anything in his earlier books.

I wish he had expanded the theme somewhat and shown us more of his characters, since they're all such good folks. This book reminded me more of one of those great old sepia photographs of westerners, where the people looked so alive and so compelling that you just wanted to climb inside the picture and get to know them. Brief glimpses are all we get in this book as well, but we get to see some unforgettable characters.

There has been a theme of darkness and loss in most of McMurtry's works, and his recently-revealed struggles with clinical depression may explain this. There is little that is dark or tragic in "Boone's Lick", and journeying with these characters, however briefly, is a real delight. I am hoping that the tone of this novel reflects a lightening in the tone of Mr. McMurtry's own life. All his readers would sincerely wish him success in his recovery. Judging by this book, he's well on his way.