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.

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Life was finally starting, Newt thought. Here he was below the border, about to run off a huge horse herd, and in a few days or weeks he would be going up the trail to a place he had barely even heard of. Most of the cowpokes who went north from Lonesome Dove just went to Kansas and thought that was far--but Montana must be twice as far. He couldn't imagine what such a place would look like. Jake had said it had buffalo and mountains, two things he had never seen, and snow, the hardest thing of all to imagine.

Okay, first of all: Three-fourths of Lonesome Dove doesn't even take place in the town of Lonesome Dove on the Texas-Mexico border. The whole point of the massive novel is leaving Lonesome Dove. Two aging Texas Rangers, garrulous Gus McCrae and stern Woodrow McCall, decide to give up their livery stable, which has led to a too-easy life, to lead a final cattle drive all the way from Texas to the Montana, arriving in the rich grasslands with their thousands-strong herd before other homesteaders and ranchers get there for them. Along for the ride are a motley crew of cowpokes: young Newt, who hasn't figured yet out figured out that he's Call's illegitimate son; Deets, the black tracker of preternatural skill; Jake Spoon, an unreliable gambler and womanizer; Lorena, a former prostitute in Lonesome Dove who sees Jake as her ticket to a better life in San Francisco; Dish Boggett, a talented cattle driver who is madly in love with Lorena. The story of these cattle drivers intersects with others: the Arkansas sheriff and his deputy who are looking to hang Jake Spoon, the sheriff's wife, who absconds with a group of rough-and-tumble buffalo hunters, and Gus' old flame Clara, long since settled on the Platte with her now-disabled husband.

Gus is the central character of Lonesome Dove. He's a skilled ranger and lawman, but he prefers to talk, and his incessant joking and chattering is the bane of his laconic partner, McCall. In fact, Gus gives the first couple hundred pages of Lonesome Dove, the part where the "outfit" is making plans for their cattle drive, a kind of broad comic quality that make the sudden death of a young Irish cowboy by a nest of water moccasins even more unsettling. It took me a long time to adjust my expectations for the novel; the juxtaposition of its comic tone and the brutality of the trail felt to sour to me, at times. The nadir of this, for me, was the introduction of a mysterious and barefoot young girl, with almost feral outdoor skills, who takes up with the hapless deputy Roscoe and who is--spoiler alert--almost immediately killed off in the most brutal manner, and not alone. But as the novel goes on, Gus' humor begins to seem more like a reasonable response to a life filled with unpredictable cruelty. The Irishman, the girl, are buried, and the cattle drive moves on.

Lonesome Dove seems, in many ways, like the quintessential western. For one, it's truly epic: 850 pages long and covering several thousand miles, as well as a couple dozen different character viewpoints. It's a snapshot of the American West at a moment when it seems empty, Native Americans driven back, the buffalo thinned out to near-extinction, but before the great droves of settler wagons and cattle drives that Call and McCrae know are coming. Sometimes, the Western tropes are a little too strong. I didn't like the depiction of Blue Duck, the unusually vicious Comanche outlaw who kidnaps Lorena and sells her to a group of Indians and Comancheros to be beaten and raped. Though Lonesome Dove makes some gestures toward ambivalence about Native Americans--Gus is supposed to have a more compassionate demeanor toward them than many of his peers--but Blue Duck seems like a monster straight out of American myth, the kind that has long been used to justify genocide and displacement. And I was troubled by the character of Lorena, too, who is headstrong at first, and who becomes terrified and helpless after her ordeal. Vicious Native Americans, helpless damsels.

But ultimately, I was engrossed by the vividness of the characters, and the sweep of the novel's great drama. The novel gets stronger, I think, the farther the outfit goes, and the wider its scope becomes. It's sort of a marvel, actually, that the novel doesn't falter as it brings in the Arkansas sheriff, July Johnson, or the story of Gus' old love Clara, a headstrong woman who has lost two children and whose husband now has been rendered braindead by the kick of a horse. But the novel is something like Gus and Call themselves: stifled by the lazy, talk-heavy life of a Lonesome Dove horse trader, and needing the great open space of the West in order to thrive. By the time the cattle drive arrives in Montana, it has become a legend in its own right, but the costs have been great: lives lost, men buried in unmarked graves in impossible to find places. Every real Western needs to have a measure of ambivalence about the West, and this is Lonesome Dove's. Has it been worth it, to reach Montana? Is the myth worth the men it leaves behind?