The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry

In Thalia sex was just not talked about. Even Genevieve would go to  considerable lengths to keep from calling a spade a spade. Everything acknowledged the existence of sex: babies were born now and then, and things to prevent them were sold at the drugstores and one or two of the filling stations. The men told dirty jokes and talked all the time about how they wished they had more pussy, but it didn't really seem to bother many of them so long as the football team was doing well. The kids were told as little about sex as possible and spent most of their time trying to find out more. The boys speculated a lot among themselves and got the nature of the basic act straight when they were fairly young, but some of the girls were still in the dark about it when they graduated from high school. Many girls simply refused to believe that the things the boys peed out of could have any part in the creation of babies. They knew good and well that God wouldn't have wanted any arrangement of His to be that nasty.

Sonny and Duane are seniors in the (very) small town of Thalia, Texas. Duane is going with Jacy, the most beautiful girl in the school, and plans to marry her, while Sonny secretly pines for her. When Sonny breaks up with his own girlfriend, he finds himself adrift, until the school's coach asks him to drive his wife to a medical appointment. Sonny and Ruth, the coach's wife, find themselves ineluctably drawn together: for Sonny, it's a chance at the kind of real physical intimacy that scarcely belongs to the naive world of high school girls. For Ruth, whose boorish husband prefers the bodies of his male students to hers--a sexuality so secret that he seems not to even recognize it in himself--Sonny offers a chance to be touched, and loved, for the first time. They try to keep it a secret, not very well. Sonny and Ruth's relationship forms the core of The Last Picture Show, and flawed as it is, it may be the only relationship, in either physical or romantic terms, that gives anybody in the sad, lonely town any kind of pleasure at all.

McMurtry's vision of small town America is horribly bleak. Thalia is stultifying and repressive, ruled by a set of social norms that murder pride and pleasure of any kind. The Last Picture Show is, at its heart, a book about the consequences of sexual repression, which manages not to eliminate sex but to transmute it into dangerous, joyless forms. One of the favorite pastimes of the boy of Thalia High School is--unbelievably--to "play around" with local farmers' calves. That's how little romance McMurtry has for small towns--they're full of people who fuck cows. Repression's other consequences are, if not as graphic, even more dispiriting: the boys pay a whore to have sex with a mentally handicapped teen against his will; the deeply closeted coach lashes out of his own misery by having an English teacher fired for being the "queer" he himself really is; Sonny and Duane receive their own sexual initiation among underage, pregnant prostitutes in Mexico. And none of the adults, Sonny's parents or Jacy's, who have spent their whole miserable lives in Thalia have relationships that are anything but curdled.

Among such repression, Jacy, the prettiest girl in school, quickly learns to weaponize her attractiveness, using sex to climb the social ladder, from Duane to a series of wealthy "city boys." (Hilariously, the "city" for these characters is the metropolis of Wichita Falls.) Knowing that Sonny has always held a torch for her, she sets out to wreck his affair with Ruth just because she can. She even goes so far as to suggest eloping, in order to stick it to her parents, who she knows will come to fetch her and have the marriage annulled. She's a moral monster, and yet she is only what small towns like Thalia are designed to produce. She, too, is a victim, young and naive enough to think that her sexuality is a weapon that only she can wield and not one that can be wielded against her, too; she knows enough to see the way that she might manipulate Duane and Sonny but walks into the very same traps when set by men who are richer, older, or more sophisticated.

I really enjoyed Lonesome Dove, but I think The Last Picture Show is the more powerful novel. Lonesome Dove is a true epic, a long book (and part of an even longer series) written over a large map, and though it begins in Texas it encompasses nearly all of the American frontier. The Last Picture Show is a modern vision of the frontier that has shrunk down, where the last few generations cling to a lonely and barren place. Even as Duane gets out of Thalia--by way of the U.S. Army--Sonny never seems able to imagine a life outside of Thalia. The scene where, having graduated, he attends a football game only to discover how outside that world he is, is one of the saddest in a book where all of the scenes are sad. Even the excursions to the outside world--Wichita Falls, Fort Worth, Matamoros, even a senior trip to San Francisco--seem to exist only to confirm how provincial and inescapable Thalia really is. It takes real skill, I think, to craft a book so singularly punishing and bleak that doesn't feel like an exercise in cynicism. But I think The Last Picture Show speaks powerfully against a small-town romanticism that may be even more powerful today than it was when it was written. Sometimes, small towns are just small: in size, in vision, and in virtue.