What to Read After “Lonesome Dove”

Jia Tolentino
A staff writer covering culture

As a known booster of the McMurtry masterpiece, I am frequently asked by friends who’ve just finished “Lonesome Dove”: What could possibly come next? What should a person read when she’s book-hungover from an absolutely breathtaking American doorstop and itchy, to the point of desperation, for more of the same? My best answer for this is sort of, actually, low-key . . . “Gone with the Wind.”

Published in 1936, Margaret Mitchell’s epic was my favorite book by the end of elementary school, owing in large part to the indulgent material attention Mitchell pays to the Georgia landscape (“Spring had come early that year, with warm quick rains and sudden frothing of peach blossoms and dogwood dappling with white stars the dark river swamp and far-off hills”) and to Scarlett O’Hara’s wardrobe (I can still recite, like the Lord’s Prayer, her pre-barbecue choice between the rose organdie, the black bombazine, the sprigged muslin, and the green-plaid taffeta with the grease spot on the front of the basque). I’d considered rereading it many times in adulthood, but could never make it past the egregious dialect Mitchell uses for the enslaved characters—one of many, many manifestations of the book’s committed racism. This past winter, though, my reading pattern broke down in a way that could only be fixed by a big dose of pulp and sweep. I needed politics, history, romance, violence: bloody mud on the battlefield, babies and lace and ribbons at home. The war novel with a domestic lens is one of my favorite literary subtypes, but none break through a cognitive rut quite as bluntly as “Gone with the Wind.” And so, I recruited a friend and reopened my copy. “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it,” the book begins, and I was instantly all the way in.

What ensued was about a thousand text messages back and forth as my friend and I sped through the book, and a slow contagion in which more of our friends have been convinced to pick it up. “Gone with the Wind” is evil, and far more interesting for being evil. (Scarlett, one of the finest comic characters ever written in literature, is, terrifyingly and amazingly, a lot like Donald Trump.) The novel registered to me as a paragon depiction of American political consciousness, or lack thereof. Scarlett’s world is constructed through immeasurable exploitation; it implodes in war and reconstitutes itself in hideous struggle. It all happens about a half-inch away from her face, and, yet, all she really thinks about is her wardrobe, her dinner options, her love life, her bank account. Plenty among us, as our country commits atrocities across the globe, might relate.

For more: read Tolentino on the time McMurtry had her “spellbound.”

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Coming soon:

• “Sunrise,” by Téa Obreht, which is publishing on August 11th, is about a woman who, after surviving a small-plane crash, finds herself in a seemingly abandoned town in the mountains of Wyoming.