| Title | : | The Last Picture Show |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0752837214 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780752837215 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Mass Market Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 280 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1966 |
The Last Picture Show Reviews
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Twenty years ago, if you had asked if I’d like to wallow around in a pool of desperation and loneliness, I would have said it’s kind of you to ask, but no thank you! These days, I take to it like a pig to mud, I guess. If you’ve read this exceptional novel already, then you’ll know why I can’t help using a silly farm animal analogy. If you haven’t read it yet… well, I’m not spilling the beans! Sensitive readers beware. However, Larry McMurtry only illustrates the truth, as disturbing as that may be. He writes realistic fiction. He hasn’t failed me yet and this book impressed me as much as the others – including his masterpiece, Lonesome Dove. I swear this guy has a Ph.D. in The Human Condition. I think he understands men and women equally well. He knows the worst of them, the best of them, but most of all he knows that every single one of us has weaknesses. He makes it clear that there might be a little something recognizable in those we most despise as well – whether in ourselves or in someone we know quite intimately. When it comes down to it, loneliness is often at the heart of the most desperate acts no matter who you are.
“When he passed the city limits signs he stopped a minute. The gray pastures and the distant brown ridges looked too empty. He himself felt too empty. As empty as he felt and as empty as the country looked it was too risky going out into it – he might be blown around for days like a broomweed in the wind.”
Thalia, Texas is one of those places we all know about – on its last legs, just barely breathing. A place where no one stops to visit and everyone wishes they had a way out. Most of the people here are stuck. They’re barely living, just like the town itself. There’s not much joy to be found here so people seek those things that make them feel most alive – booze and sex. And they’re not too fussy about where they find these things either. They all fantasize about the prettiest, most sought after girl in town (and the biggest bitch), but they’ll settle for whatever they can get their hands on. Like so many of McMurtry’s characters, you’ll find some of the most memorable ones here as well. From the main voice of teenaged Sonny to the scheming yet naïve Jacy to her unflinching and desirable mother, Lois, to the wise Sam the Lion to the woman who really broke my heart, Ruth, I found myself completely caught up in their lives.
“Loneliness is like ice. After you’ve been lonely long enough you don’t even realize you’re cold, but you are. It’s like a refrigerator that had never been defrosted at all- never. All these years the ice has just been getting thicker.”
I’m grateful that McMurty also had a grand sense of humor. Mixed throughout all the doom and gloom, I was able to laugh here and there. At the expense of certain characters, naturally. “A good gun beats a woman any day.” Where else but in the ‘good ol’ U.S. of A.’ can you find an expression like that?! Or this: “Fraternity boys were gentlemen and would fall right in love with her when she let them screw her.” Sounds like a shaky strategy to me, but maybe I was introduced to the wrong fraternity boys! Some characters are wiser than others.
When the biggest attraction in Thalia, the picture show, is threatened by loss of income, that’s when you know the town is in its biggest decline. There are towns like this everywhere. I see it here in rural parts of New York. The inhabitants hang on by the thinnest of threads while everything around them crumbles to bits. And still they are trapped, not knowing how or even able to escape. This is another favorite for sure!
“He had just begun to realize how hard it was to get from day to day if one felt hopeless.” -
An American idyll infused with sex and adolescent (as well as much adult) longing. I adored every single page of this fast-moving, microsociety-under-a-lens type story which depicts the sexual and schoolboy escapades of two friends in a small Texas town. This is the last time things will be like this, therefore the adjective "Last" in the title. It is exquisite & very fun to get through. Anecdotal power at its height, Larry McMurtry should've won the Pulitzer Prize for this one, perhaps more so than for his behemoth "Lonesome Dove" (gasp!). This is what's great about America, not a Rockwell portrait, not a ride down the Mississippi with Huck. This is on the cusp of modernity, at the stirrings of current globalization: The Story of the Death of The Small American Town.
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Well, this ain't no Lonesome Dove. Yes, it's penned by the same author, and it's set in Texas, but that's basically where the similarities begin and end. The grand, expansive romanticism in LD is nowhere to be found here. Neither is the hope for a better life, or struggle against punishing weather systems. The only element that the characters here are fighting against is loneliness.
It's so bleak, it's so dead, the life in this small Texan town. It's so empty. It's so limited. Monotonous. Rinse and repeat.
Funnily enough, I loved that. Or, rather, it broke my heart, but it resonated a deep truth for me. I imagine John Updike probably loved this book - especially the bedroom scenes between Ruth and Herman Popper. Or any scene featuring the incredibly jaded, promiscuous Lois, drinking from her flask.
Everyone in this book is reaching for temporary relief from heartache and invisibility - through sex. There's a TON of sex in this book, some with prostitutes, much of it teenage, some of it middle age. And some of it teenage AND middle age.
It's a near perfect book. I think this would have completely had me, like completely, had it not been for "that scene". If you've read it, you know what I'm talking about. If you haven't, well, let's call it the "bovine rape scene" in which a gaggle of teenagers wrestle down a blind heifer and fuck her. So sorry. I spoiled it for you! And McMurtry spoiled the book a bit for me too, by including this lovely bit of bestiality. I'm not that easy to shock, and I don't think I'm naive, but I had a really tough time believing a whole bunch of boys would think this is a great idea. And two of them being main characters - well, it made me care a lot less about their fates or feelings knowing this is their idea of fun (and not just once, this wasn't their first rodeo, folks). Do I sympathize with people who sodomize animals with their friends? Hm, not particularly.
In fact, I didn't care a lot about the teenagers here. In addition to the moo-love, the pretty 16 year old Jacey was shallower than a toddler's wading pool. Instead, my heart went out to the older characters, the mothers, the wives, who had barely managed to get to their 40s without committing suicide. Their despair is real. Their need to connect, even if temporarily, is tremendously poignant. Their disappointment so far reaching - vaster even than the desert landscape traversed by the cowboys of Lonesome Dove. -
The moment when The Last Picture Show became one of my favorite books occurs on page 75. Larry McMurtry describes an orange bulb glowing over the back seat of a school bus and the amorous activities of the two seniors sitting underneath it, but as he does through much of his sometimes poignant, sometimes flagrant, ultimately magnificent coming-of-age novel published in 1966, the state of being a teenager in the northern plains of Texas of the early 1950s is what McMurtry is writing about. In any other place or time, the orange bulb would be inconsequential, but McMurtry shows me why it is so much more. Like the bulb, he partially illuminates an entire world.
The novel focuses on Sonny Crawford, a soft spoken high school senior in the town of Thalia, where you'll find one street (Main) with any businesses on it. Three of them--the pool hall, the diner and the picture show--are owned by Sam the Lion, a stoic old bachelor who for lack of a family looks after the boys who have none to speak of. This includes a mute bastard named Billy abandoned as a child in front of the movie theater, but also Sonny and his best friend Duane Jackson, an All-Conference fullback who roughnecks with a local drilling crew and lives in the boarding house with Sonny, who makes a living driving a butane truck for Fartley Butane and Propane.
Sonny and Duane share a '41 Chevy pickup between them and rotate when Sonny can use the cab to court a smug sophomore, or Duane needs it to neck with his girlfriend Jacy Farrow, whose father got rich in the oil patch and is regarded as the prettiest girl in town. Duane dreams of the day he and Jacy will be married and can perform conjugal activities together, unaware that his girl views him as a distraction from boredom and a tool against her mother Lois, the fiercest woman in town. Lois' idea of a suitable boy is Lester Marlow, a citified geek who succeeds in luring Jacy away from a dance at the American Legion Hall to a pool party in Wichita Falls, where the rich kids attend naked.
Jacy and Lester had not been gone from the dance ten minutes before word got around that they were going to a swimming party where everyone would be naked. The reason word got around so fast was that Lester told several of the younger kids about it just before he left. He told them he and Jacy were going to swim naked, just like everybody else. It was almost past belief, but when the kids saw him actually drive away with Jacy they instantly believed it and began to talk about it. Nothing wilder had ever been heard of in Thalia--it was even wilder than actually making out, because that was customarily done in the dark and nothing much could be seen.
In no time there were groups of excited boys standing around, speculating about the look of Jacy's breasts. They even had a hot argument over whether or not blond girls really had blond hair underneath their panties. Some of the younger, illiterate kids thought that all women had black hair in that particular place, but the better-read youths convinced them otherwise by reference to the panty-dropping scene in I the Jury, a book the local drugstore could never keep in stock.
While Duane experiences the ups and downs of dating a local celebrity, Sonny finds himself without a girl to court. The only other woman in Thalia he lusts in any way after is Genevieve, a punchy waitress pulling down all-night shifts at the diner while her roughneck husband recuperates from an injury. That changes when Coach Popper offers to get Sonny out of his afternoon classes if he'll drive the coach's wife Ruth to a doctor's appointment in Olney. As delicate as a mouse and almost as rarely seen, Ruth finds companionship she desperately needs in Sonny while the boys finds something he desperately needs alone with Ruth.
Meanwhile, Jacy begins sneaking away from Duane to cavort with the senior nudists in Wichita Falls every chance she gets. She determines to make their host Bobby Sheen fall in love with her and comes close one late night, until Bobby discovers Jacy is a virgin. Determined to give her backward and country image a makeover, Jacy determines to lose her virginity to Duane on the senior trip to San Francisco. The only kink in her strategy is Duane, who might not agree to the breakup so easily. Jacy considers becoming more friendly with Sonny and using him to make Duane jealous. When she learns about Sonny and Ruth Popper, Jacy determines to put that romance on ice.
Duane is so sick of Thalia he proposes to Sonny that they take off. With donations from Genevieve and Sam the Lion, the boys drive the furthest they've ever been away from home, to Matamoros, but their adventure south of the border brings more sorrow than it does excitement. Following the senior trip, Jacy activates her battle plan against both Duane and Sonny, but she too discovers that rather than feel empowered by sex, she seems lonelier than ever. and while Sonny and Billy inherit the poolhall, the picture is ultimately forced to turn out the lights for good. The changes confuse Billy a great deal.
All through October, then through November, Billy missed the show. Sonny didn't know what to do about it, but it was a bad time in general and he didn't know what to do about himself either. He had taken another lease to pump. He wanted to work harder and tire himself out, so he wouldn't have to lie awake at night and feel alone. Nothing much was happening, and he didn't think much was going to. One day he went to Wichita and bought a television set, thinking it might help Billy, but it didn't at all. Billy would watch it as long as Sonny was around, but the minute Sonny left he left too. He kept going over to the picture show night after night, norther or no norther--he sat on the sidewalk and waited, cold and puzzled. He knew it would open sooner or later, and Sonny couldn't think of no way to make him understand that it wouldn't.
I don't recall high school being nearly as dramatic as portrayed here, while the amount of sex in a time when pregnancy was more difficult to prevent and cast a much greater social stigma strains some credulity in the novel. That said, McMurtry's facility with shaping characters, capturing the landscape of Texas and preserving a certain amount of wit, no matter how tragically some of the events develop is virtuoso. The rose is plain, mostly, only surface thick, like a Young Adult novel. The emotional range of the story is deep. Loneliness lurks in the background, always, even during the hijinks which McMurtry dives the reader into from a very high and dazzling platform.
After civics there was a study hall, and then lunch, a boring time. One year Duane and Jacy had been able to sneak off to the lake and court during lunch, but it was only because Lois Farrow was drinking unusually hard that year and wasn't watching her daughter too closely. Lois was the only woman in Thalia who drank and made no bones about it. That same year Gene Farrow gave a big barbecue out at a little ranch he owned, and all his employees were invited. Duane was roughnecking for Gene then and took Sonny along on his invitation. Lois was there in a low-necked yellow dress, drinking whiskey as fast as most of the roughnecks drank beer. She was also shooting craps with anyone who cared to shoot with her. That was the day that Abilene won over a thousand dollars shooting craps, six hundred of it from Lois and the other four hundred from Lester Marlow, who was Jacy's official date. Lois thought Abilene cheated her and wanted Gene to fire him on the spot, but Gene wouldn't. She cussed them both out, got in her Cadillac, and started for town, but the steering wheel got away from her as the Cadillac was speeding up and she smashed into a mesquite tree. Lois just got out, gave everybody a hard look, and started to town on foot. Nobody stopped her. Gene Farrow got drunk and Abilene kept gambling. While he was rolling dice with Lester, Duane took Jacy over behind some cars and in the excitement got her brassiere off. Sonny himself won $27 in a blackjack game, and he was not even an employee. That night somebody busted Lois' lip and blacked her eye; some thought Gene Farrow did it but others claimed it was Abilene. He had known the Farrows before they were rich, and he wasn't a man to put up with much name calling, and nobody but Lois would have had the guts to call him names in the first place; if there was anything in the world she was scared of nobody knew what it was. She was a tall, rangy blonde, still almost as slim as her daughter, and she was not in the habit of walking around anyone.
Larry McMurtry, who "lovingly" dedicates the book to his hometown, never gets caught writing characters. He documents them. The Last Picture Show alternated me between wanting to spend time in Thalia with these souls, and help them escape. The book received one of the finest film adaptations ever, in 1971. Adapted by McMurtry and Peter Bogdanovich, directed Bogdanovich and filmed in black & white, Timothy Bottoms was cast as Sonny, Jeff Bridges as Duane, Cybil Shepherd as Jacy, Cloris Leachman as Ruth, Eileen Brennan as Genevieve, Ellen Burstyn as Lois Farrow and Ben Johnson as Sam the Lion. Leachman and Johnson both won Academy Awards. -
After
Lonesome Dove, I wanted to see what McMurtry's writing was like when he wasn't invoking the Great West. The novel dedicated to the small Texas town where he grew up,
The Last Picture Show, is a rather bleak look at life in the 50s. Sonny is in high school with his best friend Duane and still a virgin. In fact, the entire book is about the discovery of sex of most of the primary characters. I was a bit taken back by the casual mention of sex with farm animals that was engaged by both Sonny and Duane and their friends - I guess things were downhill from the Lonesome Dove world where this was rare and frowned upon. I have no idea whether this was/is so prevalent, but then, having lived in Texas and traveled around it some, I suppose it is believable (they did elect Ted Cruz after all to the Senate.)
The primary tension is around Sonny's listlessness, his affair with the wife of the high school sports coach, the ill-fated relationship between Duane and the beautiful Jacey, Jacey and her willful sexpot mother Loris, and others in the community. The writing is ok, but the bleakness got a bit depressing. As Loris explains to Jacey (while encouraging her to sleep with Duane much to Jacey's surprise), "Things happen the same way over and over again. I think it's more monotonous in this part of the country than it is in other places...Everything gets old if you do it often enough. I don't particularly care who you marry, but if you want to find out about monotony real quick just marry Duane." (p. 49) This matter of fact talking is particular to Loris but speaks volumes about sexual attitudes (marry being a euphemism for sex throughout) and just feels so sad and helpless. Expressed differently to Sonny by Ruth, his 40yo lover, "Loneliness is like ice. After you've been lonely enough you don't even realize you're cold but you are. It's like I was a refrigerator that had never been defrosted at all-never." (p. 126).
The book was an ok read but falls far short of the beauty and vision of
Lonesome Dove. I also felt that the characters, as well drawn as they were, still lacked a bit of depth in many places (particularly Duane and the coach) and the book left me wanting and feeling sad.
The book is the first of McMurtry's Thalia series of five books. I did not develop enough sympathy for either Sonny or Duane to continue along these dusty, dreary north Texas landscapes to continue. I will finish the Lonesome Dove books and maybe give the Houston series, in particular
Terms of Endearment a chance, though. -
Sonny, Duane, and Jacy come of age in a dusty Texas town. What will happen to them once they graduate high school?
I snagged this for the princely sum of $1.99 on the Kindle. It was worth every penny.
As I said in the teaser, The Last Picture Show is a coming of age tale, a tale of what happens to people as they get older and drift apart. While I never read it before, it fit like a favorite t-shirt.
Larry McMurty paints a vivid picture of small town life as Sonny and the rest graduate high school and struggle to find their places in the world. Duane wants to marry Jacy. Jacy wants to do something that will get the town talking. And Sonny wants Duane's girl. Nothing really goes the way anyone planned. Just like real life.
I thought the three main characters were very realistic depictions of teenagers, not just some middle age guy's faded memories of what high school was like, and likeable, despite their character flaws. Sonny, in particular, was kind of a walking train wreck but I wound up caring about him anyway. By the end of the book, I was feeling almost as lonesome as he was. While all of the characters did some questionable things, everything rang true.
McMurtry's writing has the same bullshitting on the front porch feel Joe Lansdale's does and I have to think he was an influence on Lansdale on some level. The Last Picture Show feels a lot like the coming of age stories Lansdale has been writing the last twenty years or so, only with less cursing.
There were tons of quotable lines. All three main characters said stupid things that were a lot like things I would have said back in the day.
If you're looking for a book about friendship, love, finding your place in the world, and a bunch of high school seniors trying to have drunken sex with a heifer, look no farther. 4.5 out of 5 stars. -
Best read of the year so far. This, ladies and gentlemen, is what I call a real page turner. I couldn’t turn them quickly enough and although this was a very down to earth story (always my favourite kind) I was literally over the moon with it. Bleak and dark (oh, so bleak!!!) with a sprinkling of brilliant and intelligent humour, this was a totally unforgettable story full of equally unforgettable characters.
As much as I loved Lonesome Dove and was truly impressed with McMurtry’s powerful storytelling skills I wasn’t expecting to love this novel as much as I did. WOW.
Let me try and explain more clearly why I think this is a great novel. By now, most of you, friends, who’ve been following my reviews know I’m from a tiny little village in the southwest of Portugal. What you don’t know is how small that small little village actually is, so I’m going to tell you now so we all can be sure that I know perfectly well what I’m talking about. We’re talking about a place with 500 inhabitants in the 1980’s. Yes, you read it correctly, 500 people living in the middle of nowhere. Some didn’t even have a TV at the time. Can you imagine it? Maybe you can’t and maybe you never will, but I do as I’ve been there. That’s where I learned most of what I know now and lived my teenage years. In that small little village I learned that we’re all made of the same material and we all want the same things in life; Love and understanding. Love and companionship. And sex, obviously.
McMurtry has also been in that same little place. He knows how it feels. He wouldn’t be able to tell a story like this just by using his imagination. I know he also felt it in his skin and bones. I know he also felt like he had all the time in the world to observe people in the same way one would look at a goldfish swimming around and around all day in its bowl. Hell, I know some people there better than I know myself and I’m sure some of them feel the same way about me.
Even McMurtry, so far away in Texas, knows me well. Oh, so well... -
“…for no reason he could think of life was becoming more complicated.” (4.5 stars)
Larry McMurtry is one of those writers whose books I enjoy so much, because they are his books. I think if I had read the story contained in THE LAST PICTURE SHOW written by someone else that I would have hated it. But McMurtry writes people, with all their complications and foibles, so unassumingly that I buy in. Every time!
Taking place in Thalia, Texas (the scene of two other excellent standalone novels in the “Thalia trilogy”) in the early 1950s, this novel, with its focus on teenagers as they leave high school behind is sensitive, harsh, disgusting, crude, and tenderhearted. All the things that teenagers can be, depending on the day.
With its focus on Sonny and Duane, best friends, and the girl they both have feelings for (Jacy Farrow) the story is written in the 3rd person omniscient point of view and the point of view we are getting changes from section to section. This device is used effectively in this text, and besides the three main characters we jump into the heads of many secondary characters at key instances which greatly enhances the scope of the novel.
There are lots of standout sections in the text, but here are a few…
The poignancy of this moment gave me pause. A character says, “The reason I’m so crazy is because nobody cares anything about me. I don’t guess there’s anyone I care much about, either. It’s my own fault, though- I haven’t the guts to try and do anything about it.” The sadness and harsh personal realization in that statement are bold.
Chapters 10 & 11 of this book are notable.
Chapter 10 is harsh. What happens there is disgusting and awful and part of the petty cruelty of young people that is by and large unintentional. McMurtry just presents the action without commentary by any of the characters and it messes with the reader. You want someone to say, “This isn’t right”, but no one does. The author forces you to make that judgment yourself.
Chapter 11 is a sensitive and absorbing portrait of a forbidden love affair. Because of the individuals involved I should have been horrified. I wasn’t.
As a former English teacher I had to laugh long and hard when a character expresses dismay at a male English teacher in the local high school as “that’s a woman’s job.” And then I remembered I was the only male in the English department I use to work with. Ha!
I had to grimace when one of the young protagonists expresses dismay at the end of a love affair. He muses, “It was very confusing to him because he had always thought you were supposed to get whoever you really loved.” Who hasn’t learned the truth of this? Only the very lucky, I imagine.
As is usually the case with a Larry McMurtry novel, the characterization is spot on. There are some beautifully rendered secondary characters in this book that I adored. And there were some that I detested. I despised the characters of Coach Popper and Jacy Farrow. Hated them. Although I would be lying if I did not admit that McMurtry drew them in such a touching, nonjudgmental manner that I could still see and empathize with their humanity.
There are lots of quotes I marked in the text. For the sake of brevity, here are just a few:
• “Once you got rich you’d have to spend all your time staying rich, and that’s hard thankless work.”
• “Something about it was good, even if much was bad.”
• “Loneliness is like ice. After you’ve been lonely long enough you don’t even realize you’re cold, but you are.”
• “I don’t want to be old. It don’t fit me!”
• “Romance might not last, but it was something while it did.”
• “…but some things had to be accepted if one was to become a woman of the world.”
• “Win a few, lose a few. That’s really the way it goes, all through life.”
• “He felt as though life was completely beyond him.”
• “He had just begun to realize how hard it was to get from day to day if one felt hopeless.”
THE LAST PICTURE SHOW is another example of Larry McMurtry creating a text peopled with real folks, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And in his hands it feels like they are all supposed to be there.
Goodness, do I love this writer! -
”The only really important thing that I came in to tell you was that life is very monotonous. Things happen the same way over and over again. I think it’s more monotonous in this part of the country than it is other places, but I don’t really know that – it may be monotonous everywhere. I’m sick of it myself. Everything gets old if you do it often enough.”
Set during the early 1950s in the small Texas town of Thalia, the story revolves around Sonny, an independent high school senior who plays football, hangs out at the pool hall and goes to the movies at the town’s only theater. Sonny’s best friend Duane is dating Jacy, the local rich girl, and Sonny harbors his own secret and guilty crush on her. As their last year of school plays out, Sonny is often disinterested and bored with the predictable routines of the people he’s known his whole life, but he begins to learn that many of them have depths he never suspected.
McMurtry does an excellent job of immersing the reader in the kind of ennui that can come with living in a small town where it seems that nothing ever happens, and the occasional shocking event is smoothed over by the soothing blanket of the mundane. Even the smarter characters like Jacy’s mother Lois and Sam, the owner of the pool hall, seem to have piled up the weight of their regrets to the point where they are unable to break free of the lack of inertia that keeps them all rooted in Thalia.
This is a terrific short novel and one of my favorite McMurtry’s. However, this reread has presented me with a dilemma. I’ve read the sequel Texasville before, but it’s been a while and I think I generally liked it. I didn’t realize that there are three more books after that. I’m tempted to read them all, but McMurtry has burned me before with the sub-par sequels and prequels to the excellent
Lonesome Dove. I'm on the fence as to whether I should give them a chance or not. -
I cannot understand how this book has received such high ratings. It was only the second book I have ever been unable to finish due to pure distaste for it. It's described as a "coming of age" story, but all I picked up on was that "this is a fucked up town full of fucked up people".
For instance: Duane and Jacy. The star couple of the high school. Jacy's family is rich, Duane is poor. Jacy's parents don't like Duane, blah blah blah. Typical storyline for a rich girl and a poor boy. Jacy is thinking of going all the way with Duane, even though they won't be married until after school. Blah blah blah, right. Well, at first, I was rooting for Duane, the poor kid who landed the rich girl who doesn't care that he's poor. Then, one night Jacy goes to a party with the rich kids. Duane is pissed off and he and his friends get drunk, and decide to do the most normal thing on that Friday night: chase down the blind cow on someone's farm and have sex with it. That's right, a bunch of teenage boys and one cow. I'm pretty sure the term "cow orgy" was used by the author. So, how can I go on rooting for Duane to have sex with Jacy when he has put his dick in a cow. Forget that! This ins't the only thing I read in the book that grossed me out, but I won't go into the rest of it.
All I can say is that I can't enjoy a book if I don't identify with or at least partially like a character. At least ONE character! Almost all the people in this book are fucked up. This isn't a painting of small town life. This is a book about a car crash in the form of words.
If I can save at least one person from reading this book, my job is done. -
Thalia is a decaying, dusty Texas town in with little to offer teenagers Sonny, Duane, and Jacy. They are looking for love, experimenting with sex, drinking booze, and wanting more than the town of Thalia can give them. This coming-of-age novel, set in the 1950s, is populated with eccentric small town characters that hang out at the poolhall, the all-night cafe, and the picture show. When the theater closes, it's one more reason to want to escape this dying town. Larry McMurtry does add some humor as he writes a good portrayal of lonely, unfulfilled people in this fading rural area.
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Yes, this book was a spotlight on a small town in Texas in the mid 1950's. Yes, there were some great characters, good and bad. One year in the life of two friends, and the girl they both loved, who was rich, pretty, spoiled and worthless as a piece of fluff. There were some adults in the town who cared enough to listen and try to help.
But the overriding theme of this novel is the hopelessness and loneliness of life. Apparently the only way to escape from Thalia, Texas was to join the army or die. Sex and booze helped momentarily, but eventually just made things worse.
I appreciated Larry McMurtry's writing, but in the end, I just could not connect with these characters. There was very little happiness, good luck, or good sense within this town. It was bleak and depressing, with little redemption for anyone. I know I'm in the minority with my rating, but not a favorite for me. -
Most novels want to grow up to be this novel.
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We've all driven by them on the way to places more important - small towns in the middle of nowhere with its main street stores now boarded up. Maybe there's a gas station you'd rather take your chances running out of gas than stop at and a cafe with one or two customers wearing greasy, battered baseball caps. You're surprised when you see signs of life in the houses- a red geranium in a Mexican pot by the front door. How do people live here? What do they do all day? You speed away before the smell of death settles on you. The dying of a way of life that was once vibrant is Larry McMurtry's concern in this book and in most of his other "cowboy" books. There's elements of nostalgia in the book, as clearly some good things are being lost, but the nostalgia is not the sugary kind. These small towns are still populated by human beings with the kind of flaws and ugliness you'll find in the suburbs. Adolescents still must find a way to grow up and ways to spend the crazy energy that sizzles in their limbs. One of the reasons I read McMurtry's books now and then is for the lack of pretense and style in his narrations, which doesn't mean he doesn't work hard at it. In a lot of books there is a separation between the narrator and the author but in this book the separation is not there, or if it is, the gap is very small. You can feel the author telling you the story directly as if the two of you were out camping and he decides to tell you a story to fill the two hours before you go to sleep. And you sit there, quiet and delighted because the guy is funny and also not afraid to stop being funny and describe things that are sad and he does it with the raconteur's expertise, which means that there's tons of detail of the kind that takes you there to the place and to the mind of the characters. The story telling is not fancy. He'll tell you for example that Sonny was depressed and won't dwell too much on it assuming, as he should, that you know how that feels. If you are starting to write or if you've done it for a long time and find yourself stuck, this is a good book to read. It loosens you up from the notions of perfection that might be burdening you. Tell the story that's in you as best you can, as if you were telling it to a good friend who enjoys hearing it as much as you do telling it.
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I love this book -- it has so much sadness, but there's nothing weak or self-pitying about any of the characters. They just carry on, even without a purpose in their lives.
Larry McMurtry is a genius at taking stuff that would be unspeakably horrible if it weren't so funny, and then making it really funny.
One obvious issue no one else has mentioned is the irony that this book was written long before the LONESOME DOVE novels, yet it deals with the Texas that rangers Call and McRae sacrificed so much to create. One of the themes of LONESEOME DOVE is Gus asking plaintively, "was it worth it?"
And of course, the answer is contained in this book. Because these characters are living such stunted, joyless lives that it seems very hard to believe that the buffalo, the Comanche, and the Mexicans all had to be sacrificed to make way for the town of Thalia. And more than that, you feel that somewhere Buffalo Hump and Kicking Wolf are actually laughing at these people. And that if a war party of ghost Comanche could come back and destroy the whole town it would be more of a mercy killing than anything else.
And none of that makes the book itself any less poignant. Just the opposite, in fact. -
Four stars, because I think three is too little, but four is too many. I'd like to give this one three and a half stars please. Generally everything was very nice in this book (if a book that reads like a car crash can be said to be nice), and I found myself pretty engaged in the story, but there was something about the book that made me think, yeah I kinda read this one before, maybe not set in a high school football loving Texas town, but still something that I've read before in a similar but different way. Does this make any fucking sense? Good but not remarkable.
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I wasn't sure about this at first; it seemed a pretty shallow account of life in small town America. But as I progressed through the book, it really started growing on me. The characters became more rounded, and the description of their lives and the small town they lived in was honest but poignant. I read this, because I had seen the film (I thought so anyway, now I'm not sure about that). So, in the end I was impressed with the book, not as much as with
Lonesome Dove, but it would be hard to match that book!
The edition I read had an introduction by
Mary Karr, which contained spoilers, so I'm glad I didn't read that until the end.
Things I didn't know about
Larry McMurtry:
1/ The film 'Hud' is based on his first novel
Horseman, Pass By
2/ McMurtry appears in
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
3/ McMurtry studied with
Wallace Stegner at Stanford. -
The melancholy at the heart of this novel is heartbreaking. And if you know the movie, you have a really good idea of the characters, setting and storyline of McMurtry's novel. Like the movie, the novel itself is in black and white. A handful of likable characters are surrounded by small-town ignorance and trapped by circumstance or their own limited understanding of the world. Meanwhile, much of the story takes place in the bitter cold, colorless months of north Texas winter.
A year passes, from one football season to the next, and during those twelve months, the central characters, Sonny and Duane, graduate from high school and have a number of adventures, as much as two single young men can have in a small rural community. Duane is obsessed with Jacy, the richest, prettiest girl in school. Sonny, who has the more tender heart, befriends the coach's 40-year-old wife, Ruth. And their story is a sweet contrast to the generally coarse, unfeeling or blighted relationships among the rest of those in the town. Of the very few in town who seem to feel something like full-hearted love, McMurtry only gives us glimpses and dwells instead on what is to be lamented in the rest of his characters' unlived lives.
Like the R-rated movie, this is an R-rated book, with somewhat more graphic detail. Meanwhile, the inner lives of his characters, as McMurtry reveals them, give the reader a great deal more of their shifting moods, ironies and nuances of attitude and emotion. With Sonny as the most central character in the novel, you get a much deeper and more sympathetic portrayal of him. And finally the book is worth reading for the scenes that did not make it into the movie.
Like his two earlier books, "Leaving Cheyenne" and "Horseman, Pass By," this is a finely imagined novel, with strong, memorable characters, and a mood that ranges between the farcical and the profoundly sad. I'm happy to recommend all three. -
For those of you that have never read the book but perhaps have seen the movie...you should know that there is 100 miles of differences between the two. The book was published in 1966, five years before the movie was produced. I was amazed that the book is literally filled with surprisingly far more explicit sex than almost any novel that has been written today...55 years later. There are MANY...and I do mean many... scenes in the book that describe sex between the characters in very erotic detail. One of the things that struck me particularly odd about this novel was the lack of romance in the way that McMurtry dealt with all this steamy sex. This is diffidently not a book that everyone will enjoy but I had to give it a 4 star rating for the very nerve of the author to write this at that time.
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Definitely one of the more personally distubring books I've read, both for what occurs in it, and for how other readers react to it like it all makes perfectly realistic sense. My high school experience apparently was highly unusual in lacking constant bizarre sexuality, because I can't seem to relate to much of anything here. I read it very quickly, from a certain train-crash standpoint, but I don't really understand how this is "realistic" or insightful into adolescence. Maybe you need a small-town experience to understand this one.
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A sleepy, dusty old town filled with warm and wonderful characters. Frustrations of small town living are in every day and still the people move forward.
Of the three main characters, Duane, Jacy & Sonny, I like Sonny the best. But the lives of all of these characters is poignant and warm as they find their way through their last year of high school and into the world.
I look forward to continuing their stories in
Texasville one day soon. -
Having lived in West Texas for a decade in my teens and twenties, this book is pure nostalgia for me. It’s also so achingly painful that it leaves me feeling empty and lonely at the end.
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The farm boys having sex with a blind cow was like the fourth worst part of this book. Impressive?
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I was less than swept away by this book. In fact, I didn't finish it, because I just couldn't stomach it. I guess playing pool, drunken Saturday nights, baiting the disabled, sex with heifers, infidelity and other gems are not my cuppa. I saw the movie years ago, but barely remember it.
Edited April 20, 2010
I wrote this review back in 2008. Clearly I have pushed someone's button's by disliking what is a favorite book of theirs. Sorry folks. I didn't like it. That's not to say it wasn't well written or pivotal in other's lives. I. Didn't. Like. It. I'm not going to justify myself or get into a pissing contest with these guys. They're pretty amusing, even if they clutter my mailbox with their desire to hear themselves speak.
If you liked the book, fine. Many blessings on you. That's why there are so many books out there, because we all have such different tastes, even from ourselves at different times of our life.
Love,
Norman Bates' mother.
http://www.amazon.com/review/R2OV3HLV... -
I was always fond of Peter Bogdanovich's film version of
The Last Picture Show, so I decided to read the novel it was based on.
Larry McMurtry's book was every bit as good. The characters were well drawn, especially Lois and Jacy Farrow and Ruth, the coach's wife. The small town of Thalia, Texas, is a character in its own right -- and what a desolate place it is. All the teenagers are starved for love and restlessly bumping at the threshhold, while the adults are either dispirited or cagy, like Sam the Lion. -
Per tutta la prima metà del libro non succede quasi niente.
Individui sperduti in una cittadina sperduta, gesti irrilevanti, giornate e serate trascorse nel nulla.
Poi quasi senza accorgertene ti rendi conto che percepisci il vento terroso che spazza le strade continuamente, che vedi e "senti" i personaggi, li hai fatti quasi tuoi, ti sembra di averli davanti, osservarli davvero, avvertirli nel profondo.
E di colpo ti cade addosso la sensazione piena di esserci entrata dentro, in questo libro fatto quasi di niente eppure incredibilmente pieno, e il groppo in gola ti coglie a tradimento, verso la fine, lasciandoti l'incanto di qualcosa di indimenticabile. -
Julie says this should be my next McMurtry and who am I to argue?
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3.5 Thalia, Texas is a dusty little town. The people who live there have few options when it comes to life, love or entertainment. High school is pretty much the highlight of life and after that, it’s all downhill. And even high school isn’t all that great.
“Is growin' up always miserable?" Sonny asked. "Nobody seems to enjoy it much."
"Oh, it ain't necessarily miserable," Sam replied. "About eighty percent of the time, I guess."
I was about a third of the way into this novel when I realized that nothing whatsoever is going on in the lives of these characters except for sex. The high school kids think about nothing but their next make-out sessions and how far they can go. There’s plenty of cheating, cougar sex, hooker sex and the very worst--- barnyard sex. I truly hope that this is not a real and common thing in dusty rural towns. I was truly appalled. Apparently, sex is the only activity in town except maybe going to the pool hall or the picture show, or playing football. (By the way, today, that coach would be fired in a hot second. He’s not just a pig with his wife, but with his students also.) Sadly, virtually none of the sex involves genuine feeling; it all arises out of boredom, loneliness or popularity positioning.
Sonny’s been dating his girlfriend for a year while fantasizing about his best friend’s girlfriend. Jacy’s the most beautiful girl at school and Charlene, Sonny’s girl, doesn’t compare; but there just aren’t other good choices. But what about older, married women who are miserable and lonely in their marriages?
Sonny has an opportunity with and older, married woman and goes for it. This woman is desperate for some affection and Sonny gives her something that passes for it.
“You have to remember that I've been lonely for a long time. Loneliness is like ice. After you've been lonely long enough you don't realize you're cold, but you are... I don't know, maybe at the center of me there's some ice that never will melt, maybe it's just been there too long. But you mustn't worry. You didn't put it there.”
When Jacy gets bored and is looking for a way to make herself look scandalous and exciting, she sets her sights on Sonny and he drops his older lady like a hot potato.
Things don’t go well for Sonny. And he feels awful for some of his behaviors. After he graduates from high school, he realizes that the best of his life has passed him by. He has no future and no hope.
“People he had known all his life were all around him, but they simply didn’t see him.”
“He had just begun to realize how hard it was to get from day to day if one felt hopeless.”
McMurty does a great job of portraying his nowhere town and its going-nowhere people. I just wish he’d developed their characters beyond their sex drives. But I’d love to watch the movie, which McMurty says was better than the book. -
A perfect small town tale
McMurtry is a master story teller. The town of Thalia could be any small western town in the 1950’s but they way McMurtry spins in we are deeply invested in the people even though we know the ending will be tragic. He was one of a kind and will be sorely missed. This book is a masterpiece.
