Texasville

 

Texasville – Larry McMurtry

This is one of the strangest books that I’ve ever read; and not really in a good way.  This book tries to be funny.  Note that statement: “Tries to be funny”. It’s essentially an oxymoron.  You’re either funny, or you’re not.  Ok, I did laugh at times, but most of all, this thing just fails because the story is so outlandish and the characters so bizarre, it never quite works.  The characters aren’t believable, yet granted that never seems to be the author’s intention. Reading this book reminded me of the movie “Raising Arizona”.  You were never supposed to take any of those characters seriously either, yet the whacked-out characterizations made you laugh out loud most of the time.  Maybe had my imagination been a bit better, I could have imagined such outrageousness in these pages, but it simply never worked for me.

To add to the irony, this movie is a sequel to the well-known critically acclaimed “The Last Picture Show”. If I’m honest, I enjoyed that film more than I did the book, but the point I’m trying to make is that the atmosphere and story of these two novels were so radically different, that I simply couldn’t conceive myself that I was reading about the same town and the same people.

It’s now the early 1980s.  The town that was dying thirty years ago has had an oil boom and it’s caused many in the town to become wealthy overnight. But as we know, then the OPEC driven glut hit, and now everyone in the town is broke again. Especially Duane Moore. He was one of the main characters in the first story. He’s now a 40-something year old with an obnoxious wife, four horrible children, and he’s about 60 million dollars in debt. The entire story is told through Duane’s eyes, and he seems to be the only normal person in this town.  A normal person couldn’t exist in such circumstances. We see Duane slog around his life trying to find some sort of normalcy, but such dreams are ridiculously unrealistic. You know you have a bad story when the most likable character in the book is a dog.

The ”plot”, for lack of a better word, involves the centennial celebration of the neighboring town, Texasville.  Apparently, Texasville is even more depressed and depressing than where these characters live (the fictitious town of Thalia, Texas), yet that won’t stop the locals from putting on a spectacle, including a highly involved theatrical production that starts with the Earth’s creation (Adam and Eve), all the way through the 20^th century.  All I could think of was “who in a town like this could put something together like this? And more importantly, who would actually attend?”  As I’ve implied, this book simply was too idiotic in terms of realism.

Then there’s the sex.  Good Lord.  I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel that had this much sex.  It seems as though even though the residents of Thalia understand the word “marriage”, they’re clueless to what the word “monogamy” means.  It’s too much.  It’s never good when a man is sleeping with several women, and is somewhat in competition with his own son over several of these women.  Have you ever seen those detective shows where the cops have a bulletin board filled with notecards of different people with arrows pointing to the other notecards?  You know, so they can try to keep up with all of the relationships?  You literally need to do something like this when it comes to who is having sex with whom in this book.  No, I mean the word “literally” literally.  It’s almost as if author Larry McMurtry set a personal goal to break a world’s record of how many times all of his different characters can all have sex with everyone else.  I just found myself shaking my head at the constant incredulity.

There are other areas of this book that are beyond stupid that don’t serve any purpose but to fill up page space.  Those events definitely weren’t necessary since this thing was already over 500 pages, but for some reason, the author insists on bloating the overly obnoxious story.  There’s one scene where the Governor of Texas tries to attend the celebration by helicopter that goes nowhere.  There’s also a scene where Duane and wife Karla (I say ‘wife’ in the loosest term possible) drive to Dallas to see a psychiatrist.  The whole chapter was completely idiotic and pointless.

Speaking of Karla, it should also be mentioned that everyone’s “favorite” of “The Last Picture Show” was the sultry young Jacy.  She arrives back in town (of course she does) after a brief career as an Italian actress, and she in Karla began to have a somewhat strange friendship.  How Duane never kills these two is beyond me.

This book was by far the worst novel by Larry McMurtry I’ve ever read. He can do comedy quite well; I would recommend his Berrybender tetralogy.  This one, though, was not good at all.  The lens through how I envisioned this story was so clouded, though, I can’t help but wonder if I was just looking at the story in a completely incorrect way. If you happened to have read this thing, I hope you enjoy it more than I did.