CLIMBING THE FOOTHILL

By John Skow

No question about it, Larry McMurtry's shaggy new novel Dead Man's Walk (Simon & Schuster; 477 pages; $26) passes the all-important "Call me Ishmael" test. Its first line is "Matilda Jane Roberts was naked as the air." After that start, the narration wafts aloft into further elegant absurdity, as follows: "Known throughout south Texas as the Great Western, she came walking up from the muddy Rio Grande holding a big snapping turtle by the tail. Matilda was almost as large as the skinny little Mexican mustang Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call were trying to saddle-break."

McCrae and Call? We've heard those names before. The two Texas Rangers--each just 19 as Matilda and the snapper heave into view, and with glory, the death of the buffalo herds and the fencing of the open range still ahead of them--are of course the heroes of McMurtry's magnificent horse opera, Lonesome Dove. A personal note: this reviewer is unreliable on the subject of Lonesome Dove, which he rereads with increasing fondness whenever he encounters a November in his soul.

It can't really be true, after all, that Lonesome Dove, published in 1985, is the finest American novel since, let's say, The Naked and the Dead and Catch-22. Yet that's the contrary view here. McMurtry is a good, busy, workmanlike novelist, but except for that single volume, not a great one. An earlier novel, The Last Picture Show, caught scraps of magic with its misty recollection of long-gone boyhood. Terms of Endearment worked well and deserved its success. Some of the author's other modern-day fiction (Texasville; Evening Star) has been merely expert and forgettable.

You can't forget Lonesome Dove. It is not much more than a good tall tale, dust glowing in the sunset after horsemen have passed by. But McMurtry found a way to retell the worn old western stories of lawmen and gunmen. The grubby, lonely, smelly God-awfulness of the Old West fascinated him, and he raised it to the level of myth, used it to paint his scenery. It is no accident that Lonesome Dove begins, "When Augustus came out on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake--not a very big one ... 'You pigs git,' Augustus said, kicking the shoat. 'Head on down to the creek if you want to eat that snake.'" The gritty particularity of the snake, the pigs and McCrae's irritation start things off right. It is acceptable for Augustus to be a hero--which he is, flat out--if his stage is a ridiculous outpost so man-, woman- and dog-forsaken that not even the rattlesnakes are safe.

A less beguiled reader might have turned away when the author, a couple of years ago, came out with a sequel, The Streets of Laredo. There were problems; Call was an old man, and McCrae had died toward the end of Lonesome Dove, after their Hat Creek Cattle Co.'s long drive to Montana. But Laredo worked as a tip of the author's sweat-stained Stetson to Lonesome Dove, and that was good enough.

If Dead Man's Walk were not a prequel, it would be worth only glancing notice. As things are, it is a satisfactory foothill, with the grand old mountain in view. There are no heroics, though there is plenty of calamity. Call and McCrae, too young and foolish to know better, short on everything except energy and ignorance, have joined a ragtag outfit called the Rangers, less a military force than a band of hungry looters, commanded by a puffing, self-anointed general. This faker has heard about Santa Fe, then a Mexican settlement, but does not know where it is. Nor does anyone else. Nevertheless, they set out to capture the town and live happily ever after.

Instead the Rangers are overwhelmed by Mexican soldiers, and the survivors reach Santa Fe in chains after an agonizing mountain trek. The novel's plan is not much different, in fact, from that of Lonesome Dove or Streets of Laredo: an incredibly difficult journey that no prudent soul would have undertaken, with a psychopathic Comanche (Blue Duck in Lonesome Dove, Buffalo Hump here) skulking in the shadows to pick off stragglers.

McMurtry has a fine time with youthful damnfoolishness, and so does the reader. The young Rangers are randy and daft, and so coltish around women that, as in Lonesome Dove, they refer to sexual congress as a "poke." Call and McCrae survive by dumb luck, though it's not clear by adventure's end that either has learned a dime's worth of sense. In fact, they are still 19.

Which sets the reader to musing: by rough calculation, there are about three decades of imprudence and dusty commotion to get through before they become the leathery, intermittently shrewd men of Lonesome Dove. The prequel hasn't really completed its job. Obviously a postprequel or two is required before the central novel can decently begin. Buffalo Hump still lurks. McCrae seems about to marry, though surely not if the sly heartbreaker in the general store is thinking clearly. And the great-grandlitters of pigs not yet born and rattlers not yet hatched must colonize the town of Lonesome Dove, a backwater that no one, least of all the two saddlesore heroes, has heard of.