The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry

 

I am the daughter of a third generation cattleman. My father, his father, and his grandfather, all worked in the Chicago Union Stockyards before it closed in July, 1971. I grew up with stories of the men who handled the livestock told every night at our dinner table. 

They were not the men of today. They were rough and bold and brave and strong. They had to withstand the bullying handed out daily by man and beast alike. If any one of them  would have worked his hair into a bun, or put on eyeliner, I cringe to think what would have become of him. 

When Liveright sent me The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry, in celebration of its 60th Anniversary, I eagerly consented to read and review it. For Lonesome Dove remains one of my favorite books of all time.

The Last Picture Show is not Lonesome Dove.

Of course it would be foolish to assume such a thing; how can a band of cowboys as found in Lonesome

Dove be recreated? Why, in fact, would they be? Especially as the focus of The Last Picture Show is on a small, western town, not on adventure.

In The Last Picture Show we begin with two teenagers. Sonny and Duane are upperclassmen, bored with the antics of the freshman, and eager to find love. Or, at least intimacy. We have the wife of the high school coach, who is lonely and desperate enough to crave the attentions of Sonny. We have a town outside of Wichita, named Thalia, which must be one of the loneliest, dustiest towns about which I have ever read. It has a pool hall. A diner. A school of no academic merit that I could see. And people who are living lives of quiet desperation.

I began reading with a sense of nostalgia, as Sonny wakes up on the first Saturday after the last football game he will ever play, and I continued on eager to uncover the characters’ lives through their interactions. Take, for example, when Jacy’s mother, Lois, comes into her daughter’s bedroom at night with this piece of advice:

The only really important thing 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 in other places, but I don’t really know that - it may be monotonous everywhere. I’m sick of it. 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. 44

It speaks much more of Lois’ life than it does about the fear for her daughter’s.  

Jacy, apparently, has no fear at all. She is the prettiest girl in Thalia, and the richest; she has a reputation to build up and hold on to, which will permit neither modesty or honesty.

It took a rich fast crowd to go swimming naked, and Jacy always prided herself on belonging to the fastest crowd there was, moral or immoral. Indeed, for a rich, pretty girl like herself the most immoral things imaginable would be to belong to the slow crowd. That would be wasting opportunities, and nothing was more immoral than waste. p. 74 

Well, we come it immorality in short order after Jacy goes swimming and the boys decide to chase down a blind heifer in its pen. I had to lay down the novel, unable to read further.

But, perhaps I have gleaned the gist of what McMurtry was portraying: a small town in the West inhabited by imperfect, foolish, and ultimately, lonely people. It doesn’t matter that the setting of The Last Picture Show was sixty years ago. The town he has shown is surely a picture of the American town that was, and continues on today, in many ways, just as it did then. Are we able, in any community, to move beyond our frail humanity?