The Lonesome Gods

A long 1983 novel set in the Southern California desert and in early Los Angeles, and generally treated as L’Amour’s most ambitious book. Its premise is a boy abandoned to die in the desert by a grandfather who hates him, taken in and raised at the margins, who grows up educated, self-possessed and eventually prosperous in a Los Angeles that is still small — with the grandfather’s enmity waiting at the other end. L’Amour worked the desert and the Spanish-Mexican California past harder here than in his cattle-country novels.

L’Amour is the commercial centre of American western fiction — close to ninety novels, almost all still in print — and a citizen-forming list reaching for a Western is reaching for the genre’s moral shape: self-reliance, a code held to without supervision, and landscape as something a person is measured against. Worth reading as the popular form doing its work, alongside The Virginian, which invented the conventions, and True Grit, which plays them for irony.

Context: Listed under Western in the Ages 13-99+ band, Lexile 1000. The list also places this title in its younger band, but Kyle’s ruling was to card the adult band only.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the curriculum this came from; the adult “Ages 13-99+” band is the part Kyle carded.
• Louis L’Amour — the author.
• Frontier — the subject the genre exists to work on.
• The Virginian — the novel that established the western’s conventions, carded from the same list.
• True Grit — the third Western entry in the adult band, and the one that treats the form comically.
• Storytelling — L’Amour as a study in the popular narrative craft: plot delivered without friction.
• Republic of Letters — the portfolio idea, here at the mass-market end.