There were opportunities in Lonesome Dove for various important characters in the story (particularly Augustus McCrae, who was a man of really great possibility) to overcome their key weaknesses, to get past their blind spots in life and turn their whole destiny around...to triumph over their limitations and their long-accustomed habits and make a profound breakthrough. Not one of them did. They all held doggedly to their established attitudes, whatever the heck those were, until it finally destroyed them and those they loved the best. They threw their lives away frivolously and uselessly, despite showing great heroism in the struggle. Call was the worst. The man was an utter disaster. McCrae could have saved himself, he had the character and intelligence to do it, but he ran away instead from the one woman he truly loved to die a pointless and foolish death in Montana.

It makes me sick reading something like that. It's the utter defeat of the human Spirit. Real life is tough enough already without composing fictional stories like that which make you feel even worse about it than you already did.

That's my objection to Larry McMurtry. I cannot believe what he seems to believe about human existence, and I cannot fathom why he would want to write the kind of stories he does...although he writes them quite brilliantly, no doubt.