Leaving Cheyenne

By Larry McMurtry 

Genre: Western Novel That Is Less About Cowboys And More About Wanting The Same Things Everyone Else Wants Among Wide Open Spaces

Recommended For: Someone who has felt the counterintuitive nostalgia for being young and pining to grow old and know that brutal sensation and weight of growing up hit you like a brick wall through the only way you can really feel that particular feeling: love coinciding with responsibility 

Leaving Cheyenne isn’t the monumental work that Lonesome Dove is, but it’s special. I’ll never really pin down if Texas and the Southwest are McMurtry’s kingdom or if he can just write characters with such distinctness and such terrific dialogue that it really doesn’t matter where they are. They just so happen to usually be in Texas. 

This was one of his earlier novels. Before Lonesome Dove. Before The Last Picture Show. Before he became known as one of the great American writers. I love it though. It’s essentially just the story of a love triangle, and that’s really all you need to know. 

Western novels are rarely described as rural - that word is usually reserved for voting demographics, written or said with a slant that implies “boring,” which is not how we are meant to perceive the environment surrounding the Western novel, full of unpredictable elements, slow talkers with quick reflexes and uncertain motives and cooperative horses. 

But that’s what the terrain is in these books: rural. And to live there is difficult, not necessarily in the romantic cowboy way, but in the sense that there is a lot of hard work to be done. More importantly, especially if you are young, like the three primary characters in Leaving Cheyenne, there just are not very many people around. 

That lack of social opportunity puts such an intense weight on a teenage crush, which I don’t think I have to tell you already is an enormous weight. So, take two teenage boys, one teenage girl, nothing else going on, and a writer who respects them enough to give their perspective as much merit as any adult in any city in the world, and you get rich, layered, unpredictable dynamics that have you carrying the book around with you and sneaking in pages wherever you can. 

Naturally, though, all that wide open space exaggerates the questions that we wonder about young people: Are they in love or are they just bored? Or intrigued by the possibility of something else? 

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Among many things that McMurtry’s writing is able to make me feel in Leaving Cheyenne, one of them is lazy. The picture he paints is one of a lot in life in which work - manual labor - is a default. The primary characters don’t necessarily enjoy that work - it’s a point of contention between one of them and his father, who seems to take pride in work.

On one hand, it’s not as simple as to say these characters are conditioned to a life of work in a way that I’m not. Two of the primary characters, Johnny and Gideon, fundamentally land on two different sides of acceptance of that work. One sees it as what must be done, while the other feels that if this was cast upon him unfairly then it is within his right to try to escape it. 

Still, I would like to think that I am not alone in 2025, as a person whose job parks me in front of a laptop, when I can say that work and life tasks, physical or otherwise, can feel like an overwhelming weight. Perhaps part of that is that life in 2025 includes a mental burden brought on by social media or work’s access to our pockets or AI’s clumsy assault on anything we try to enjoy; all of which exhausts a person’s will before they can try to do any actual labor. 

Johnny, Gideon, and the third member of their triangle, Molly, are ultimately trying to get to each other. And for as messy and painful as that becomes to each of them, there is something plainly simple and beautiful about how that relates to their work or their daily struggle. They are what’s on the other side of it for each other.

And for most of us, that is still a core dynamic we can still share with our work. It is the thing that precedes the realization of our relationships. Whether it is our partners, friends, parents or whomever we get to spend moments with, we all ultimately part ways with our various responsibilities. Work is often a drag, even when you love what you do. But time has to be spent doing something. There are better things to do than work, and I will never tell you that work is admirable for work’s sake. That’s your boss’s job (and don’t listen to them!). I can only tell you that someone is on the other side of it somewhere.

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