BEEN THERE, DONE THAT

By John Skow

Writing a sequel to a rare, magical novel can be a dodgy undertaking, and it's not hard to see why. The fine first novel gets done, let's say, because an enchanted story taps the author on the shoulder and titanic characters rage to be let loose. The sequel trundles along, often as not, merely because writer and readers want to spend more time with people they've grown fond of. The forces at work aren't as powerful, and enchantment can be elusive. It could be a letdown, for instance, to learn that Ishmael, rescued by the Rachel, returns to New Bedford and starts a seafood restaurant called The White Whale, only to be shut down by a spectral, one-legged inspector from the board of health.

Consider two new sequels by a couple of very good writers, Larry McMurtry (Comanche Moon; Simon & Schuster; 752 pages; $28.50), and Peter Matthiessen (Lost Man's River; Random House; 539 pages; $26.95). Each lengthy book has its strong points, and each is worth a reader's time; but for quite different reasons, neither entirely works.

McMurtry's new novel is both sequel and prequel, chronologically the second installment, though written last, of a four-part saga whose splendid third book (written first) is that most beguiling of all horse operas, 1985's Lonesome Dove. A raunchy, sentimental narration about a couple of old Texas Rangers on a cattle drive, this Pulitzer prizewinner was McMurtry at the absolute top of his form. The author, as much in love with Lonesome Dove as his readers were, contrived a sequel, Streets of Laredo (1993). It was pale and sad because Gus McCrae, one of his heroes, was dead, and the other, Woodrow Call, was old. Then in 1995 McMurtry reached back with a thunderation called Dead Man's Walk to pick up his heroes as daft and randy 19-year-old Rangers on a misbegotten invasion of Mexican territory.

Comanche Moon is in some ways the best of the subsidiary novels propped against the central narration of Lonesome Dove. The core of it is a moody, valedictory view of Southwestern Indians at the time just before and just after the Civil War (which appears only as a distant commotion). Comanche raiding bands in Texas are beginning to starve because whites to the north have slaughtered the buffalo herds. The author develops a couple of minor figures we've met before, the fearsome chief Buffalo Hump and a quizzical tracker named Famous Shoes, who are among the best characters in the entire saga. A mad subplot involving a Central American sadist and a crazed New England scholar is good, chilling fun.

Call and McCrae are the author's unsolved problems. In Lonesome Dove they were amusing middle-aged adolescents, which seemed to be the author's gloss on the American West. This means, however, that in the long present novel they spend many, many chapters not maturing: Gus mooning for his lost Clara, and Woodrow being cold to Maggie, his son's mother. When they turn sideways on stage, they are seen to be band-sawed from plywood, a drawback that at last seems to matter.

Lost Man's River is another kind of troublesome sequel, a second swat at an obsession that has buzzed around the author's head for a decade or more. Killing Mister Watson, published in 1990, was Matthiessen's impressive, exasperating novel about the shooting, in 1910, of a man named E. J. Watson, by a mob of angry townsmen in southwest Florida. Was Watson a hardworking planter and family man who paid his bills and helped his neighbors, or a bar brawler and casual gunman who killed his hired hands rather than pay them at the end of the cane-cutting season? Or was he both?

The Watson episode is at least partly factual. Matthiessen excels at writing nonfiction, but he seems uncomfortable inventing the astonishments--the outrageous lies--that keep novels afloat. Perhaps for this reason, he locked his readers away from E.J. Watson and the central drama. He presented his novel as a sheaf of tortuous, conflicting depositions by participants and onlookers that left the truth about the enigmatic Watson untold. Lost Man's River carries the puzzle forward, but in doing so withdraws an additional 50 years from the event. Lucius Watson, one of E.J.'s sons, by now an elderly, self-apologetic historian, pokes around, finds the sole credible witness still alive and to some extent sorts things out. The oddity here is that the author cares more about the old shooting than most of the characters seem to. As with the first novel (a necessity for understanding the second), what is first rate is Matthiessen's loving descriptions of wildlife, human swamp dwellers and the interwoven land and water of the coastal islands. A third book, with more home truths about old E.J., is promised.