What do You think about Buffalo Girls (2001)?
I liked the idea of this story more than the execution: Calamity Jane traveling the old west and accompanying Wild Bill Cody to England with his Wild West Show, which they performed for the Queen. Exciting stuff! Well, not exactly. By the time the book opens, Jane is a drunk that wanders around with other sad friends as they pine for the time before the west was won. Most of the characters behave like idiots, and you can't believe they survived as long as they did. Jane spends most of the story drunk and crying, feeling sorry for herself and wishing she could change (but she never does). I enjoyed the parts that were written in Jane's voice, as letters to her daughter. I was a little confused, however, when the author jumped between this format and others. There were five "sections" in the book, which made it feel a bit unfinished. Like maybe he meant to go back and tie the parts together.I would have liked the story to dwell a bit more in England. At least different things happened there, instead of the same day replayed over and over. I understand that, day-to-day, life is repetitive. That doesn't mean I want to read about it!The most compelling character in the book turns out to be the one indian, No Ears. He's more pensive than the white folk, and spends much of his time philosophizing. At least he wasn't sad like Jane's other friends.
—Michele
Historical fiction with such historical names as Martha Jane Canary, Dora DuFran, Teddy Blue Abbott, William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody, Jack Omohundro, Sitting Bull, Annie Oakley, the Countess of Warwick (Daisy), Russell of the Times, and Potato Creek Johnny. But the person who steals the whole book is a fictional ancient Indian scout named No Ears. When he's in the story, it's MacMurtry at his finest. One flaw in the book for me were the letters from Calamity Jane to her daughter who is also called "Jane." It was a mistake having her tell us about events that MacMurty should have had happen in the story.
—Jimmy
An old compliment to actors that you rarely hear anymore is, "I'd listen to him read the phone book," and I thought of that as I was reading Buffalo Girls. When it comes to Larry McMurtry, I'd read it if he wrote the phone book because, as plotless as it might be, he would somehow manage to convey in it all the pain of daily living. Not that Buffalo Girls has no plot, but it's a thin one; it's mostly just a few old characters coming to grips with the fact that the time of the American West as an untamed frontier is coming to an end. The reader gets to wander along with Jim Ragg, an old beaver trapper who laments the near-extinction of the beaver because of people like himself, his partner Bartle Bone who mostly just goes where Jim goes, Dora DuFran, who walked into Abilene a starved girl wearing her dead father's shoes and found success in one of the few ways available to women of the time, as well as other less central but no less tragic characters. Mostly though, this is Martha "Calamity Jane" Canary's story, and the narrative device that McMurtry uses to portray her marginality and loneliness is as heartbreaking as it gets. I'd be unlikely to read this book again as it's far too sad and, frankly, a little boring in stretches, but I understand there's a movie based on it starring a miscast Angelica Huston as Calamity Jane (and a woefully miscast Melanie Griffith as Dora), so I might try to watch that just to have something to complain about.
—Rachel
