“Texas has produced no major writers or major books,” wrote Larry Jeff McMurtry, rather despairingly, in 2011. He was being modest. McMurtry, who died in 2021 at 84, was himself an undisputed titan of the Lone Star State and a wildly prolific one at that. During his lifetime, McMurtry published 33 novels and a baker’s dozen of memoirs, essays and assorted balooey. McMurtry’s best-known works weren’t just major — they became major motion pictures like “Hud” (adapted from “Horseman, Pass By”), “The Last Picture Show” and “Terms of Endearment.” And the rest were only as minor as the descending chords in a bluegrass ballad, idiosyncratic variations on a warm and wistful twang. You don’t need to know all the songs by heart for the melodies to linger.
McMurtry’s life, like his bulging bibliography, is tough to get one’s arms around. (To paraphrase a regional cliché, everything is bigger in a McMurtry novel — especially the page count.) Raised on the outskirts of tiny Archer City, Texas, to a cattle-ranching family and educated in the California hills of Berkeley alongside Wendell Berry and Ken Kesey, McMurtry was a tangle of contradictions. He was a known crank and an infamous flirt; a small-town bohemian; an Oscar winner (for adapting “Brokeback Mountain”) and a pathological antiquarian.
But, through it all, he was a writer — averaging between five and 10 pages a day of something, every morning, for decades. And though he was an unlikely exemplar of his home state in appearance — teetotaling, bespectacled, with a mild phobia of horses — Larry McMurtry was, in fact, a peerless interlocutor of Texas, bridging the gap between its rural past and its noisy, urban present. And despite dalliances on the West Coast (with Cybill Shepherd and Diane Keaton, among others) and expensive habits (rooms at the Chateau Marmont, caviar at Petrossian), he always returned, somewhat grudgingly, to his birthplace. By refusing to let Texas define him, he helped redefine it.
For someone with such a keen and penetrating voice, he sure loved to listen. In a McMurtry book, everyone is interesting — even tertiary characters are a riot of quirk and detail. And, most notably for a white male writer of a certain age, McMurtry was fascinated by women, not in an objectifying manner, but rather with a dogged, almost courtly interest in the particulars of their lives. Say you’re one of the millions who have wept happily at the conclusion of James L. Brooks’s adaptation of “Terms of Endearment.” You’re book-curious, slightly cowboy-averse and don’t know where to begin. Great news! The answer is easy: “Terms of Endearment” (1975). Deeper and more digressive than the film adaptation, the novel orbits the ravenous Aurora Greenway. She is gargantuan in appetite and affect, collecting parking tickets and suitors with intoxicating gusto (though not every suitor: Jack Nicholson’s Garrett Breedlove is a purely cinematic invention). As with many McMurtry heroines, the frippery masks a spine of pure steel. When tragedy gathers, the true purpose of Aurora’s overstuffed social network is revealed: not to distract but to protect. Any tears you might shed at the end will be for the still-hopeful living, not the unfairly dead.
(“The Desert Rose,” from 1983 — which swaps swampy Houston for the dry heat of Las Vegas — would make a nice double feature. Once again, a vibrant woman is knocked into a tizzy by a wayward daughter, only this time with sequins.)
I’d like to read his masterpiece.
“Lonesome Dove” (1985), a.k.a. Your Dad’s Favorite Novel, is the book McMurtry avoided writing for the first half of his life — and spent the second half of his life relitigating. Like Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” (released the year before), the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Lonesome Dove” is a masterpiece of missed intentions.
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“One of McMurtry’s aims in ‘Lonesome Dove’ was to pierce the romantic image of the trail-riding cowboy,” Tracy Daugherty writes in his recent biography. And the novel does its level best: As two retired Texas Rangers, Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call, lead a cattle drive from the Rio Grande to Montana, their quixotic caravan encounters the worst the world has to offer. The young and innocent die terrible deaths; the open country, far from romantic, is arid and hostile. “It’s mostly bones we’re riding over anyway,” Gus thinks, in a cheerful attempt to keep despair at bay.
And yet the book — which began life as a proposed screenplay that would bring James Stewart, Gary Cooper and John Wayne back for one last rodeo — is undeniable, awash in wit and wonder. With a canvas close to 1,000 pages, painted like a prairie sunset across a proscenium of sky, “Lonesome Dove” remains one of the best and happiest reading experiences of my life. To McMurtry’s chagrin, few myths were busted — in fact, quite the opposite. Multiple generations have now replaced their memories of the Alamo with those of the Hat Creek Cattle Company: something else rather foolish, noble and fleeting that’s nonetheless impossible to forget.
(A note to the TV crowd: Yes, the 1989 CBS miniseries is iconic. But only the novel is essential.)
Actually, I’m a little leery of cowboys.
A novel not so much written as expectorated, “All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers” (1972) is a baggy, scabrous romp through the seedy underbelly of intellectual ambition. With a surreality as muggy as a Houston summer, the book tracks the delirious unraveling of Danny Deck, a hopeless romantic and graduate student who flirts dangerously with everything, including the cardinal sin of success. When his debut novel is somehow sold to a publisher, he packs up his cuckolding wife, Sally, and (against his better judgment) a sozzled, omnisexual English professor named Godwin and heads for the West Coast.
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The journey does not go smoothly, but the prose sure does: This is McMurtry finding his voice and chasing his bliss, even as he excoriates his chosen profession with masochistic glee. (“There are no writers in heaven, you know,” Godwin slurs at one point. “They don’t even know how to enjoy the bloody earth.”) “All My Friends” is the book I didn’t know I’d been looking for my entire life. For those with a perceived cowboy allergy, the McMurtryverse begins here.
(N.B.: “Somebody’s Darling” (1979), a belated follow-up to “All My Friends,” doesn’t really work. Its putative star, the sensitive director Jill Peel, is drowned out by other voices; the moviemaking satire is as broad as the barn on McMurtry’s childhood ranch. But I can’t help but love it the way McMurtry himself loved Hollywood, the cultural wellspring of his youth. The kvetching about a town awash with false idols and self-delusion isn’t fooling anybody; there’s something rather beautiful about his unblinkered belief.)
I want to take a journey with one character.
Duane Moore is an unlikely literary Everyman. Introduced in “The Last Picture Show” (1966) — and immortalized on film by Jeff Bridges — he’s a high school fullback by day and an itinerant roughneck by night. Consumed by money woes, girl problems and general ennui, he’s a proto-emo brooder, throbbing like a benign tumor within the tiny confines of Thalia, Texas (a barely disguised replica of McMurtry’s hometown, Archer City).
In “Picture Show,” his arc is tragic — cast aside by the rich, pretty blonde, he boards a bus to nowheresville. But a funny thing happened: He — and McMurtry — struck narrative oil.
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Two decades later, McMurtry revived Duane for “Texasville” (1987) as an avatar of ’80s excess: promiscuous in love and business; rich in family yet deeply in debt. The breathless pace of the book, which is cut into 98 chapters as skinny and potent as cocaine, is thrilling. Its project (the sublimation and eventual salvation of a would-be master of the universe in the noisy thrum of community) is profound. In 1999, McMurtry turned to his aging creation for “Duane’s Depressed,” a low-key wonder in which Duane stops trying to fill the existential hole inside himself and instead learns to sit beside it. (The process may have been personal: One can practically feel McMurtry writing himself out of a post-bypass-surgery malaise with every page.)
Together, these mordantly funny books form a definitive trilogy on the subject of boomer masculinity. Duane goes from wayward son to overwhelmed father to ghost haunting his own history. McMurtry, who proudly sported a T-shirt that read “minor regional novelist,” never got his flowers from the coastal establishment, but these books have a lot more to say about the back half of the 20th century than those of some louder literary lions.
How about his nonfiction?
The truth is, McMurtry was of a different genus entirely. While the Eastern elite assumed literary significance like a birthright, McMurtry saw it either like a lottery he had randomly won or a correspondence course he had doggedly completed. Though he wrote deeply (and well) about books (“Books,” from 2008), Hollywood (“Hollywood,” from 2011) and Texas (the seminal “In a Narrow Grave,” from 1968), McMurtry’s greatest nonfiction work is an exploration of how all three entwined to create his most improbable protagonist: himself.
In “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen” (1999), McMurtry attempts to trace the 20th century currents that flowed between the German philosopher and McMurtry’s own grandparents, eking out a hardscrabble existence on a dusty knoll known as Idiot Ridge. The two realities are nearly impossible to align: Benjamin wrote of the centrality of the storyteller in civic life; McMurtry writes about his grandmother, who had 12 children and then, to hear him tell it, never spoke again. Still, that foundational silence helps young Larry imagine a radically new American aesthetic, one that doesn’t look to European history for inspiration, but rather straight up into the “redemptive” beauty of the Western sky. Throughout, gorgeous observations spring up like yellow roses: Literature, he writes, “was a vast open range, my equivalent of the cowboy’s dream.”
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Help me pick which sequels are worth my time.
McMurtry often returned to characters and settings throughout his life; most of his novels don’t end so much as pause. “Moving On” (1969), for example, takes its sweet time ambling through over a thousand pages of 20-something ennui — no one but him would write a book about the last days of the rodeo circuit that’s actually about the sexual mores of graduate students — only to culminate in a casual teaser for the half-dozen lightly connected books still to come. From page 999: “Sometimes I just miss him,” Emma Horton (soon to be the star of “Terms of Endearment”) says of the mostly unseen Danny Deck (soon to be the focus of “All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers”).
There’s always more McMurtry to discover, but be warned: Not every sequel delivers the same pleasure or rewards as its source material. And many indulge in a fascinating Texas two-step. For every openhearted move toward sentimentality, there’s a violent, occasionally cruel reaction, often in the opening pages of a subsequent book.
Was this taste for blood derived from the success of “Terms of Endearment”? Perhaps. Its enjoyable, if overlong, sequel, “The Evening Star” (1992), is notable for its rough vision of what happened to Emma Horton’s children. And even McMurtry’s beloved heroine Patsy Carpenter suffers a bizarre drive-by — her happy ending is undone in a garish paragraph of domestic battery and abuse. The less said about “Some Can Whistle” (1989), a nasty stepchild of “All My Friends,” the better.
Still, sometimes the recoil leaves a worthwhile bruise. “Streets of Laredo” (1993) is an essential companion to — and corrective for — “Lonesome Dove.” After dispatching some fan favorites, McMurtry turns the full weight of his powers to everything he unfairly ignored in “Dove”: the sadness of frontier women, the fullness of Native life, the existence of trains. As a diminished Woodrow Call stubbornly tries to police a landscape, and a moment, that has left him behind, McMurtry is at his devilish, subversive best. Mothers are forced to hunt their sons. A gentleman’s sanity blows away like a hat. “If only he were in Brooklyn and not in Texas, he might not feel so low,” McMurtry wrote of that existentially doomed man. Unlucky for him — but to the great fortune of his readers — there wasn’t a chance of being anywhere else.
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