Sorry, that person's shelf is private.
0062908502
9780062908506
0062908502
4.40
2,651
Nov 17, 2020
Nov 17, 2020
it was amazing
"Life imitating art" is a phrase I hear but don't immediately cotton to. Then Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater's Dazed
"Life imitating art" is a phrase I hear but don't immediately cotton to. Then Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused illustrates all too well what life imitating art means. Published in 2020, Melissa Maerz chronicles filmmaker Richard Linklater, a huge cast of then unknowns and crew members from L.A. and Austin as they dramatized the last day of the 1976 school year for a movie. In doing so, Maerz chronicles what high school is: friendships, rivalries, tests, confrontations with authority, drugs, alcohol, romances, breakups, music, clothes, classmates who graduate to enviable success, classmates who disappear, life, death and the passage of time.
This book was poignant for me because Richard Linklater split his childhood with his mom in Huntsville, Texas and father in Houston in the 1970s and I grew up in Houston in the 1980s. When Dazed and Confused was being shot in Austin in the summer of 1992, I'd just finished my freshman year of college at the University of Texas at Austin. I sometimes wonder what it'd be like to magically visit the set of a classic movie as it was being created but here was a seminal film that literally shot around the corner from me at a time where I might've actually been hired to work on it. Part of me thinks I'm way too introverted to run cable and made better use of my time reading and writing, while another part of me wishes for a do-over. This book was that do-over.
-- Gary Price: Austin was so cheap. Everybody I knew at the time was living in a house where it was like $300, total--to rent the entire house! That's why Austin had so many musicians and artists. It has the University of Texas, which elevates the intellectual pursuits, but it's still a lazy place, because you don't have to make money to live there. People said Stevie Ray Vaughan could play like that because he only had to pay $60 a month in rent. How could he not come up with great songs when he could just play guitar all day and not work?
[image]
-- Richard Linklater: I had the indie film success to some degree. And one night, Gus Van Sant was in town, showing My Own Private Idaho, and one of his producers told me, "You're going to say a lot about yourself in your next film. You're going to tell everybody where you see yourself. Are you the weird indie guy, doing weird films? Or do you belong in the studio system?" And I took that to heart. If I was ever going to do that, now might be the right time.
-- Marisa Ribisi: In film, it's always like, "What's your big moment? What's the catalyst? What's it about?" And I think Rick was like, "It's not about anything. It's about people existing." If you look at Dazed and Confused, there was the A-story, which is, "Is Pink gonna take the pledge with the football team?" But really, they're just hanging out. How do you pitch that film? "It's the 1970s, it's the bicentennial, the music is gonna be great"? "Here, let me give you millions of dollars!"
-- Sasha Jenson: For me, talking about that summer feels the same as if you were the schoolyard with your friends many years ago and you just were playing around with a bunch of people, and you never really paid attention to the moment, because it didn't feel special at the time. And then many years later, people were like, "Remember when you were on the swing set? That was so awesome!" And you're just like, "Huh?"
It didn't feel like we were making a movie, you know? It just felt like we were all playing together, and there happened to be cameras there. That's the thing that's so unique about this movie. I go back to other high school movies and the relationships feel contrived. But Rick was trying to build real life chemistry with these kids. And I think he got it.
[image]
- Parker Posey: Rick wanted to create an authentic high school experience in 1976, and we were fully committed. High school can be catty. Does that sound sexist? Weren't the '70s sexist? Aren't we still in this patriarchal thinking? Obviously. The pitting against. It's constant and it's catty. Do I think men like to see that? Yes. When will this dialogue get so boring to the point of getting back to interesting and human?
-- Matthew McConaughey: I mean, if we're going to sit here and do any kind of psychoanalysis or objective judgment, if you're gonna try to break Wooderson down, you're already in a different narrative than he is. The everyday world, the manners and social graces, and the way life is supposed to go on and men are supposed to evolve--yeah, he doesn't fit in that. He's on his own frequency. He is living in ignorance.
Wooderson is not the kind of guy who's gonna get conscious of, "Oh, this is creepy." He's just the kind of guy that goes, "I'm sorry you see it that way. Whatever's going on in your life, I hope you get through it." I love characters and people in life with great convictions that are outside of the mainstream. At least you see where they stand.
-- Adam Goldberg: It seemed unknown whether it was going to be a Fast Times-type mainstream success. But from the moment I saw the trailer, which looked like it was actually made in 1976, I was like, Oh, this is an independent movie.
[image]
-- Richard Linklater: Before Dazed came out, I thought, maybe I'm one of those directors whose personal films are actually commercial, too. I think that's what the disappointment was. I thought my little whimsical, quirky ideas were totally in sync with the broader public, and then Dazed kind of proved they weren't. This set a template that I've gotten so used to, it hardly bothers me anymore. I learned right then and there not to consider how a film did financially as the barometer of much of anything. It's really not something you can control--it's out of your hands. The deal I made with the film gods was simply to be able to make films. The definition of success wasn't spelled out.
-- Jason London: I did a movie with Susan Sarandon, and she said, "I saw your movie two nights ago, but we didn't realize you needed to smoke a joint first, so we're going to get blazed and go see it again tomorrow." That's when I started to realize, this could be big.
-- Mark Duplass: There's this theory amongst a lot of storytellers right now that if you're creating a television show or a movie, you should set it before the year 2000, because people really want to live in worlds where social media doesn't exist. It's the biggest wish fulfillment you can offer audiences right now. And I think that might relate to the legs on Dazed and Confused, particularly now.
[image]
Melissa Maerz was a founding editor of Vulture (the website of New York Magazine) and has served stints as an editor at Spin and Rolling Stone. One of the things I loved about how she compiled this book was letting subjects respond to someone else's versions of events, which don't always correlate when people with egos who enjoyed having a good time try to recall things that happened 25 years ago. An entire chapter is devoted to the legend surrounding the discovery of Matthew McConaughey (at a bar atop the Hyatt Regency in Austin.) See Dazed and Confused if you haven't already. Buy this book if you have.
[image] ...more
This book was poignant for me because Richard Linklater split his childhood with his mom in Huntsville, Texas and father in Houston in the 1970s and I grew up in Houston in the 1980s. When Dazed and Confused was being shot in Austin in the summer of 1992, I'd just finished my freshman year of college at the University of Texas at Austin. I sometimes wonder what it'd be like to magically visit the set of a classic movie as it was being created but here was a seminal film that literally shot around the corner from me at a time where I might've actually been hired to work on it. Part of me thinks I'm way too introverted to run cable and made better use of my time reading and writing, while another part of me wishes for a do-over. This book was that do-over.
-- Gary Price: Austin was so cheap. Everybody I knew at the time was living in a house where it was like $300, total--to rent the entire house! That's why Austin had so many musicians and artists. It has the University of Texas, which elevates the intellectual pursuits, but it's still a lazy place, because you don't have to make money to live there. People said Stevie Ray Vaughan could play like that because he only had to pay $60 a month in rent. How could he not come up with great songs when he could just play guitar all day and not work?
[image]
-- Richard Linklater: I had the indie film success to some degree. And one night, Gus Van Sant was in town, showing My Own Private Idaho, and one of his producers told me, "You're going to say a lot about yourself in your next film. You're going to tell everybody where you see yourself. Are you the weird indie guy, doing weird films? Or do you belong in the studio system?" And I took that to heart. If I was ever going to do that, now might be the right time.
-- Marisa Ribisi: In film, it's always like, "What's your big moment? What's the catalyst? What's it about?" And I think Rick was like, "It's not about anything. It's about people existing." If you look at Dazed and Confused, there was the A-story, which is, "Is Pink gonna take the pledge with the football team?" But really, they're just hanging out. How do you pitch that film? "It's the 1970s, it's the bicentennial, the music is gonna be great"? "Here, let me give you millions of dollars!"
-- Sasha Jenson: For me, talking about that summer feels the same as if you were the schoolyard with your friends many years ago and you just were playing around with a bunch of people, and you never really paid attention to the moment, because it didn't feel special at the time. And then many years later, people were like, "Remember when you were on the swing set? That was so awesome!" And you're just like, "Huh?"
It didn't feel like we were making a movie, you know? It just felt like we were all playing together, and there happened to be cameras there. That's the thing that's so unique about this movie. I go back to other high school movies and the relationships feel contrived. But Rick was trying to build real life chemistry with these kids. And I think he got it.
[image]
- Parker Posey: Rick wanted to create an authentic high school experience in 1976, and we were fully committed. High school can be catty. Does that sound sexist? Weren't the '70s sexist? Aren't we still in this patriarchal thinking? Obviously. The pitting against. It's constant and it's catty. Do I think men like to see that? Yes. When will this dialogue get so boring to the point of getting back to interesting and human?
-- Matthew McConaughey: I mean, if we're going to sit here and do any kind of psychoanalysis or objective judgment, if you're gonna try to break Wooderson down, you're already in a different narrative than he is. The everyday world, the manners and social graces, and the way life is supposed to go on and men are supposed to evolve--yeah, he doesn't fit in that. He's on his own frequency. He is living in ignorance.
Wooderson is not the kind of guy who's gonna get conscious of, "Oh, this is creepy." He's just the kind of guy that goes, "I'm sorry you see it that way. Whatever's going on in your life, I hope you get through it." I love characters and people in life with great convictions that are outside of the mainstream. At least you see where they stand.
-- Adam Goldberg: It seemed unknown whether it was going to be a Fast Times-type mainstream success. But from the moment I saw the trailer, which looked like it was actually made in 1976, I was like, Oh, this is an independent movie.
[image]
-- Richard Linklater: Before Dazed came out, I thought, maybe I'm one of those directors whose personal films are actually commercial, too. I think that's what the disappointment was. I thought my little whimsical, quirky ideas were totally in sync with the broader public, and then Dazed kind of proved they weren't. This set a template that I've gotten so used to, it hardly bothers me anymore. I learned right then and there not to consider how a film did financially as the barometer of much of anything. It's really not something you can control--it's out of your hands. The deal I made with the film gods was simply to be able to make films. The definition of success wasn't spelled out.
-- Jason London: I did a movie with Susan Sarandon, and she said, "I saw your movie two nights ago, but we didn't realize you needed to smoke a joint first, so we're going to get blazed and go see it again tomorrow." That's when I started to realize, this could be big.
-- Mark Duplass: There's this theory amongst a lot of storytellers right now that if you're creating a television show or a movie, you should set it before the year 2000, because people really want to live in worlds where social media doesn't exist. It's the biggest wish fulfillment you can offer audiences right now. And I think that might relate to the legs on Dazed and Confused, particularly now.
[image]
Melissa Maerz was a founding editor of Vulture (the website of New York Magazine) and has served stints as an editor at Spin and Rolling Stone. One of the things I loved about how she compiled this book was letting subjects respond to someone else's versions of events, which don't always correlate when people with egos who enjoyed having a good time try to recall things that happened 25 years ago. An entire chapter is devoted to the legend surrounding the discovery of Matthew McConaughey (at a bar atop the Hyatt Regency in Austin.) See Dazed and Confused if you haven't already. Buy this book if you have.
[image] ...more
Notes are private!
0
1
Dec 13, 2020
Dec 16, 2020
Dec 08, 2020
Hardcover
0525520104
9780525520108
0525520104
4.00
6,641
Apr 17, 2018
Apr 17, 2018
it was amazing
My introduction to Lawrence Wright is God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State. Anyone who savors long reads in Texas Monthly or
My introduction to Lawrence Wright is God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State. Anyone who savors long reads in Texas Monthly or the New Yorker should feel right at home with this terrific book published in 2018 and with Wright, a screenwriter/ playwright/ Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who's contributed pieces to those two magazines. Wright grew up in Dallas in the '60s and with his own family, relocated from Atlanta to Austin in 1979. His perspective is that of a native son who ventured away from Texas only to return with knowledge and experience, which he applies to different areas, aspects and activity of my native state.
Rather than an academic study with footnotes, the book falls within the journalism spectrum, which I always love. Wright straps on his road gear for a bicycle trip to the five Spanish missions along the San Antonio River, with his friend, novelist Steve Harrigan. He recounts his experience being licensed to carry a handgun in a section that explores gun violence. Two entire chapters on Texas politics are highlighted by Wright's experience roaming the halls of the state capitol. He recounts hanging out with quintessential Texans like George W. Bush, Cormac McCarthy and Willie Nelson. The book is no hatchet job and often glows with love for Texas, but is also brutal and unmerciful.
From the chapter The Charms, Such as They Are:
-- I've lived in Texas most of my life, and I've come to appreciate what the state symbolizes, both to people who live here and to those who view it from afar. Texans see themselves as confident, hardworking and neurosis-free--a distillation of the best qualities of America. Outsiders view Texas as the national id, a place where rambunctious and disavowed principles run wild. Texans, they believe, mindlessly celebrate individualism, and view government as a kind of kryptonite that saps the entrepreneurial muscles. We're reputed to be braggarts; careless with money and our personal lives; a little gullible but dangerous if crossed; insecure but obsessed with power and prestige. Indeed, it's an irony that the figure who most embodies the values people associate with the state is a narcissistic Manhattan billionaire now sitting in the Oval Office.
From the chapter Turn the Radio On:
-- One of the surprises is that if you have a handgun in your car and you're drunk, it doesn't matter if you're unlicensed; but if you are licensed, you're liable to be charged with a Class A misdemeanor, which can mean a year in jail and a $4,000 fine. "A lot of my students decide not to get a license because of that," our instructor, Michael Cargill, told us. He showed us some cautionary real-life videos. A convenience-store security camera recorded a customer who happened upon a robbery in progress; the customer frantically pulls out his concealed weapon and plugs the clerk, not the robber. Another video shows a target shooter plunking cans off a log with a rifle; one bullet misfires and the shooter peeks down the barrel to see what's going on, when suddenly his gimme cap is blown off his head. People do a lot of stupid things with guns, which is one reason I've always been wary of owning one.
From the chapter Sausage Makers:
-- The bathroom bill was not unique to Texas--a dozen other states had similar bills pending--but it embodied the meanness and intolerance that people tend to associate with Texas. The bill was being sold as a way to protect women against sexual predators who might pose as transgender--a problem that scarcely exists. Laws already on the books protect women from being accosted or spied upon. The sponsors of the bill claimed that it was not meant to discriminate against transgender Texans, although the law would do just that. The only remedy for trans people would be to change their birth certificate, a costly and time-consuming procedure. The bill proposed fining schools or state agencies up to $10,500 per day for violations. "How are they going to enforce it?" Chuy Hinojosa asked me. "Would a woman have to raise her dress?" There was grumbling about the need to hire "pecker checkers."
From the chapter The City of the Violet Crown:
-- All of these disparate cultural trends that were careening past each other in Austin like swirling electrons suddenly coalesced into a recognizable scene when Willie arrived. He occupies a place in Texas and especially in Austin, that no one else can claim. He was a jazz-infused country singer with a gospel background, and a songwriter with some notable hits. When his house in Nashville burned down, he decided to return to his home state, hoping to find more creative freedom. He let his beard grow and put his hair in pigtails. You never saw a man looking like that in Texas, but Willie could get away with it.
Because he is so culturally confounding, and because his songs are so much a part of the land, everybody claims Willie. He's a leftist, a Bernie Sanders fan, but he's beloved even by Tea Party types like Ted Cruz and Rick Perry. For decades he has advocated legalization of marijuana in a state where the laws of possession are quite punitive. He has even been cultivating his own brand, Willie's Reserve. Every once in a while, some state trooper or deputy sheriff will pull Willie's bus over and "discover" his stash. Willie has gotten off with a free concert, but the arrests are universally seen as poor sportsmanship.
From the chapter More Sausage:
-- Texas leads the nation is Latino population growth. Latinos account for more than half the 2.7 million new Texans since 2010. Every Democrat in Texas believes that if Hispanics voted at the same rate in Texas as they do in California, the state would already be blue. "The difference between Texas and California is the labor movement," Garnet Coleman, a Houston member of the Texas House of Representatives, told me. In the 1960s, Cesar Chavez began organizing the California farmworkers into a union, which didn't happen in Texas, a right-to-work state. "Labor unions create a culture of voting and political participation," Coleman observed. In Texas politics, Coleman believes, "everything is about race. It's veiled as public policy, but it encourages people to believe that their tax dollars are going to support lazy black and brown people." Political views have become more entrenched because of redistricting, and yet the demographic majority in Texas is far more progressive than its representatives. Coleman predicts a showdown. "This is the battle about the future of the country, based on a new majority, and we have to have this out."
If you've thought about visiting Texas (and you should, at least in the spring), I recommend God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State. Wright demonstrates his credentials as a journalist and a native Texan and uses them both to dissect the state with passion and wit. If you're thinking about buying a home in Texas, I highly recommend this book. Insatiably readable, I loved how it was organized, with the allure and challenges of Houston, Dallas and Austin (three of the eleven largest cities in the U.S.) examined with their own chapters, as well as the state capitol, with issues like immigration, healthcare, global warming and gun violence woven in.
Somehow, my favorite five pages ended up being in the Austin chapter and specifically, the leprechaun-like arrival of actor Matthew McConaughey in Wright's neighborhood of Tarrytown. I was familiar with the actor's "naked bongo" incident from the pages of Texas Monthly but wouldn't have known that Wright was for a time McConaughey's neighbor and had a front row seat to what happened. I wouldn't say that this gossip page item summarizes a state as complex and giant as Texas, except that maybe you really can't go home again, and that Wright writes about the affair with such an unjaundiced eye for detail and also pathos.
I talked to Steve about Matthew's broken dream of a normal existence. Steve was sympathetic, but he observed that movie stars like Matthew cultivate celebrity and can't expect to escape notoriety. In any case, "he's not a 'normal' person," Steve said. "He's a wild man living in Tarrytown." ...more
Rather than an academic study with footnotes, the book falls within the journalism spectrum, which I always love. Wright straps on his road gear for a bicycle trip to the five Spanish missions along the San Antonio River, with his friend, novelist Steve Harrigan. He recounts his experience being licensed to carry a handgun in a section that explores gun violence. Two entire chapters on Texas politics are highlighted by Wright's experience roaming the halls of the state capitol. He recounts hanging out with quintessential Texans like George W. Bush, Cormac McCarthy and Willie Nelson. The book is no hatchet job and often glows with love for Texas, but is also brutal and unmerciful.
From the chapter The Charms, Such as They Are:
-- I've lived in Texas most of my life, and I've come to appreciate what the state symbolizes, both to people who live here and to those who view it from afar. Texans see themselves as confident, hardworking and neurosis-free--a distillation of the best qualities of America. Outsiders view Texas as the national id, a place where rambunctious and disavowed principles run wild. Texans, they believe, mindlessly celebrate individualism, and view government as a kind of kryptonite that saps the entrepreneurial muscles. We're reputed to be braggarts; careless with money and our personal lives; a little gullible but dangerous if crossed; insecure but obsessed with power and prestige. Indeed, it's an irony that the figure who most embodies the values people associate with the state is a narcissistic Manhattan billionaire now sitting in the Oval Office.
From the chapter Turn the Radio On:
-- One of the surprises is that if you have a handgun in your car and you're drunk, it doesn't matter if you're unlicensed; but if you are licensed, you're liable to be charged with a Class A misdemeanor, which can mean a year in jail and a $4,000 fine. "A lot of my students decide not to get a license because of that," our instructor, Michael Cargill, told us. He showed us some cautionary real-life videos. A convenience-store security camera recorded a customer who happened upon a robbery in progress; the customer frantically pulls out his concealed weapon and plugs the clerk, not the robber. Another video shows a target shooter plunking cans off a log with a rifle; one bullet misfires and the shooter peeks down the barrel to see what's going on, when suddenly his gimme cap is blown off his head. People do a lot of stupid things with guns, which is one reason I've always been wary of owning one.
From the chapter Sausage Makers:
-- The bathroom bill was not unique to Texas--a dozen other states had similar bills pending--but it embodied the meanness and intolerance that people tend to associate with Texas. The bill was being sold as a way to protect women against sexual predators who might pose as transgender--a problem that scarcely exists. Laws already on the books protect women from being accosted or spied upon. The sponsors of the bill claimed that it was not meant to discriminate against transgender Texans, although the law would do just that. The only remedy for trans people would be to change their birth certificate, a costly and time-consuming procedure. The bill proposed fining schools or state agencies up to $10,500 per day for violations. "How are they going to enforce it?" Chuy Hinojosa asked me. "Would a woman have to raise her dress?" There was grumbling about the need to hire "pecker checkers."
From the chapter The City of the Violet Crown:
-- All of these disparate cultural trends that were careening past each other in Austin like swirling electrons suddenly coalesced into a recognizable scene when Willie arrived. He occupies a place in Texas and especially in Austin, that no one else can claim. He was a jazz-infused country singer with a gospel background, and a songwriter with some notable hits. When his house in Nashville burned down, he decided to return to his home state, hoping to find more creative freedom. He let his beard grow and put his hair in pigtails. You never saw a man looking like that in Texas, but Willie could get away with it.
Because he is so culturally confounding, and because his songs are so much a part of the land, everybody claims Willie. He's a leftist, a Bernie Sanders fan, but he's beloved even by Tea Party types like Ted Cruz and Rick Perry. For decades he has advocated legalization of marijuana in a state where the laws of possession are quite punitive. He has even been cultivating his own brand, Willie's Reserve. Every once in a while, some state trooper or deputy sheriff will pull Willie's bus over and "discover" his stash. Willie has gotten off with a free concert, but the arrests are universally seen as poor sportsmanship.
From the chapter More Sausage:
-- Texas leads the nation is Latino population growth. Latinos account for more than half the 2.7 million new Texans since 2010. Every Democrat in Texas believes that if Hispanics voted at the same rate in Texas as they do in California, the state would already be blue. "The difference between Texas and California is the labor movement," Garnet Coleman, a Houston member of the Texas House of Representatives, told me. In the 1960s, Cesar Chavez began organizing the California farmworkers into a union, which didn't happen in Texas, a right-to-work state. "Labor unions create a culture of voting and political participation," Coleman observed. In Texas politics, Coleman believes, "everything is about race. It's veiled as public policy, but it encourages people to believe that their tax dollars are going to support lazy black and brown people." Political views have become more entrenched because of redistricting, and yet the demographic majority in Texas is far more progressive than its representatives. Coleman predicts a showdown. "This is the battle about the future of the country, based on a new majority, and we have to have this out."
If you've thought about visiting Texas (and you should, at least in the spring), I recommend God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State. Wright demonstrates his credentials as a journalist and a native Texan and uses them both to dissect the state with passion and wit. If you're thinking about buying a home in Texas, I highly recommend this book. Insatiably readable, I loved how it was organized, with the allure and challenges of Houston, Dallas and Austin (three of the eleven largest cities in the U.S.) examined with their own chapters, as well as the state capitol, with issues like immigration, healthcare, global warming and gun violence woven in.
Somehow, my favorite five pages ended up being in the Austin chapter and specifically, the leprechaun-like arrival of actor Matthew McConaughey in Wright's neighborhood of Tarrytown. I was familiar with the actor's "naked bongo" incident from the pages of Texas Monthly but wouldn't have known that Wright was for a time McConaughey's neighbor and had a front row seat to what happened. I wouldn't say that this gossip page item summarizes a state as complex and giant as Texas, except that maybe you really can't go home again, and that Wright writes about the affair with such an unjaundiced eye for detail and also pathos.
I talked to Steve about Matthew's broken dream of a normal existence. Steve was sympathetic, but he observed that movie stars like Matthew cultivate celebrity and can't expect to escape notoriety. In any case, "he's not a 'normal' person," Steve said. "He's a wild man living in Tarrytown." ...more
Notes are private!
1
Jun 09, 2019
Jun 10, 2019
Jun 06, 2019
Hardcover
0062661345
9780062661340
0062661345
3.72
9,634
Aug 01, 2017
Aug 01, 2017
My introduction to the fiction of Adam Sternbergh is The Blinds. Published in 2017, I was hoping for a slice of crime fiction that was exciting and fr
My introduction to the fiction of Adam Sternbergh is The Blinds. Published in 2017, I was hoping for a slice of crime fiction that was exciting and fresh. The setup intrigued me. Forty-eight men and women whose memories have been wiped clean as part of a deal with prosecutors have been placed in a private settlement in West Texas, officially named Caesura but known by its residents as the Blinds. In spite of its potential for a gothic or closed-room thriller, this is a tough action thriller I did not cotton to but can’t penalize the author for.
There were things that I thought were clever:
-- Each resident of the Blinds has to choose a new name and are given a list with the first names of movie stars and last names of vice-presidents. This results in characters with names like Frances Adams, Dick Dietrich or Bette Burr.
-- To give everyone a fresh start, no one remembers who they were. Witness relocation is for hardened criminals and law abiding citizens alike, so everyone can cling to the possibility they were a good person before they came to the Blinds, and that their neighbor wasn't a mass murderer.
-- With tattoos and skill sets as clues, as well as access to the news, residents can try to piece together who they might have been in their past lives, but no one's been able to conclude anything.
-- There is a rogue's gallery of characters. One character was an assassin known as "Costco" who collected debts by killing a distant relative of the debtor and slowly wiping out everyone the subject knew until he paid.
The Blinds isn't a static and dull story because all the characters have had their memories erased. I felt The Blinds was static and dull because all the characters have had their memories erased and aren't doing anything about it. No one wants to discover their former identity. No one wants to escape. No one is trying to survive against someone trying to kill them. They haven't built a community, haven't created a world around them. There's a murder, and our sheriff Cal Cooper investigates, but otherwise, nobody in the Blinds seems to be doing anything.
If there's one thing I find to be a drag on a novel it's characters who aren't doing much of anything but sitting around and thinking.
Instead of showing the reader something compelling, the story tries to tell its way forward. It jumps from character to character as those characters think about who they are, think what they remember, and think about what's going on. It's all very internal. Ultimately, personnel files fall into the hands of another character and we're told more information about certain residents of the Blinds. We're told that "Errol Colfax" was actually the sadistic killer Kostya "Costco" Slivko and while his exploits are very cleverly related, this is all backstory in search of a story.
The TV series Severance on Apple deals with similar subject matter and produced wonderful results, following a group of office drones at the mysterious Lumon Industries who've volunteered for a program that severs all memory of who they are outside of work each day they come in. It's marvelously weird and builds intrigue in a way that I hoped this novel could. I would read the author's previous Edgar-nominated novels, but this one was a lot more cut-and-dry than I expected.
Here's a dissenting, five-star review from a hugely popular reviewer on Goodreads!
Liz Barnsley's Reviews > The Blinds
...more
There were things that I thought were clever:
-- Each resident of the Blinds has to choose a new name and are given a list with the first names of movie stars and last names of vice-presidents. This results in characters with names like Frances Adams, Dick Dietrich or Bette Burr.
-- To give everyone a fresh start, no one remembers who they were. Witness relocation is for hardened criminals and law abiding citizens alike, so everyone can cling to the possibility they were a good person before they came to the Blinds, and that their neighbor wasn't a mass murderer.
-- With tattoos and skill sets as clues, as well as access to the news, residents can try to piece together who they might have been in their past lives, but no one's been able to conclude anything.
-- There is a rogue's gallery of characters. One character was an assassin known as "Costco" who collected debts by killing a distant relative of the debtor and slowly wiping out everyone the subject knew until he paid.
The Blinds isn't a static and dull story because all the characters have had their memories erased. I felt The Blinds was static and dull because all the characters have had their memories erased and aren't doing anything about it. No one wants to discover their former identity. No one wants to escape. No one is trying to survive against someone trying to kill them. They haven't built a community, haven't created a world around them. There's a murder, and our sheriff Cal Cooper investigates, but otherwise, nobody in the Blinds seems to be doing anything.
If there's one thing I find to be a drag on a novel it's characters who aren't doing much of anything but sitting around and thinking.
Instead of showing the reader something compelling, the story tries to tell its way forward. It jumps from character to character as those characters think about who they are, think what they remember, and think about what's going on. It's all very internal. Ultimately, personnel files fall into the hands of another character and we're told more information about certain residents of the Blinds. We're told that "Errol Colfax" was actually the sadistic killer Kostya "Costco" Slivko and while his exploits are very cleverly related, this is all backstory in search of a story.
The TV series Severance on Apple deals with similar subject matter and produced wonderful results, following a group of office drones at the mysterious Lumon Industries who've volunteered for a program that severs all memory of who they are outside of work each day they come in. It's marvelously weird and builds intrigue in a way that I hoped this novel could. I would read the author's previous Edgar-nominated novels, but this one was a lot more cut-and-dry than I expected.
Here's a dissenting, five-star review from a hugely popular reviewer on Goodreads!
Liz Barnsley's Reviews > The Blinds
...more
Notes are private!
1
Jun 11, 2023
Jun 13, 2023
Jul 22, 2018
Hardcover
0671625330
9780671625337
0671625330
3.74
4,931
1987
Apr 15, 1987
did not like it
Question: Can one of your favorite authors write one of the worst novels you've ever read? Sub-question: Is 542 pages of scraps from a favorite author
Question: Can one of your favorite authors write one of the worst novels you've ever read? Sub-question: Is 542 pages of scraps from a favorite author better than no novel at all? These questions were more compelling to me than anything in the first half of Texasville, Larry McMurtry's sequel--the first of four continuations, actually--to his acclaimed 1966 novel The Last Picture Show. Published in 1983, this book is a crushing disappointment, a massive jokefest that takes place thirty years later in the fictional town of Thalia as it still struggles to survive, hanging on now through the oil bust of the early 1980s.
The sequel focuses on Duane Jackson, a former Prom King who as a high school senior was married to town beauty Jacy Farrow for a few hours before it was annulled. Duane made millions in the oil boom, built a huge house and married a whirlwind named Karla he has four sociopath children with. With the oil bust, Duane is twelve million in debt and for more reasons than that, depressed. He shuttles between his office, the Dairy Queen and city council meetings which he presides over as mayor and is in charge of planning a centennial celebration for the county, which debates whether to acknowledge the existence of Texasville, the county's first town that has been lost in the sands of time.
There was an opportunity for a compelling novel here, one that shows how every material item a teenager in the '50s might've yearned for--money, cars, drugs and a multitude of sexual partners, or marriage and kids, or all of the above--is available as an adult in the '80s, but happiness remains as elusive as ever. McMurtry isn't interested in writing a novel that can stand up to The Last Picture Show and is content to simply let the reader hang out with the characters as they exchange jokey banter or obsess over sex in order to stave off boredom. A little bit of this would've been fine at the service of a story, but the jokes are all that's here. Imagine 542 pages of this:
Karla had also encouraged the kids to scribble their plans on the calendar, on the theory that it might make it easier to find them in case of emergency. She had tried to start calendar training when Dickie and Nellie were teenagers, but it hadn't worked well.
Dickie liked the idea of a calendar, but his entries had often alarmed his mother. His very first entry read "Go fuck girls." Many of his plans seemed to involve criminal violence. Once he wrote "Go start a fire." Or he might write "Go beat the shit out of Pinky." Pinky had briefly been a friend. Karla was always having to tear pages off calendars and buy new ones for fear that Dickie's entries might be used against him in criminal proceedings.
Larry McMurtry's novels are given to a lot of banter and broad comedy--he enjoys a car stunt almost as much as Burt Reynolds did in the movies he was making in the late '70s--but Texasville felt like a first draft being passed off as a finished book. Every chapter is exactly the same: Duane is depressed, women enter stage right to say something crazy, he drives somewhere else, men enter stage left to say something ridiculous, Duane remains depressed. I gave up at the 50% mark. It's one of the most self-indulgent pieces of free-writing that I've ever had to read and bares no resemblance to the quality of The Last Picture Show. ...more
The sequel focuses on Duane Jackson, a former Prom King who as a high school senior was married to town beauty Jacy Farrow for a few hours before it was annulled. Duane made millions in the oil boom, built a huge house and married a whirlwind named Karla he has four sociopath children with. With the oil bust, Duane is twelve million in debt and for more reasons than that, depressed. He shuttles between his office, the Dairy Queen and city council meetings which he presides over as mayor and is in charge of planning a centennial celebration for the county, which debates whether to acknowledge the existence of Texasville, the county's first town that has been lost in the sands of time.
There was an opportunity for a compelling novel here, one that shows how every material item a teenager in the '50s might've yearned for--money, cars, drugs and a multitude of sexual partners, or marriage and kids, or all of the above--is available as an adult in the '80s, but happiness remains as elusive as ever. McMurtry isn't interested in writing a novel that can stand up to The Last Picture Show and is content to simply let the reader hang out with the characters as they exchange jokey banter or obsess over sex in order to stave off boredom. A little bit of this would've been fine at the service of a story, but the jokes are all that's here. Imagine 542 pages of this:
Karla had also encouraged the kids to scribble their plans on the calendar, on the theory that it might make it easier to find them in case of emergency. She had tried to start calendar training when Dickie and Nellie were teenagers, but it hadn't worked well.
Dickie liked the idea of a calendar, but his entries had often alarmed his mother. His very first entry read "Go fuck girls." Many of his plans seemed to involve criminal violence. Once he wrote "Go start a fire." Or he might write "Go beat the shit out of Pinky." Pinky had briefly been a friend. Karla was always having to tear pages off calendars and buy new ones for fear that Dickie's entries might be used against him in criminal proceedings.
Larry McMurtry's novels are given to a lot of banter and broad comedy--he enjoys a car stunt almost as much as Burt Reynolds did in the movies he was making in the late '70s--but Texasville felt like a first draft being passed off as a finished book. Every chapter is exactly the same: Duane is depressed, women enter stage right to say something crazy, he drives somewhere else, men enter stage left to say something ridiculous, Duane remains depressed. I gave up at the 50% mark. It's one of the most self-indulgent pieces of free-writing that I've ever had to read and bares no resemblance to the quality of The Last Picture Show. ...more
Notes are private!
1
Aug 21, 2018
Aug 24, 2018
Dec 23, 2017
Hardcover
0316363294
9780316363297
0316363294
3.84
26,455
Sep 12, 2017
Sep 12, 2017
really liked it
Bluebird, Bluebird is one of those novels that I felt was written for me. Published in 2017, this is the fourth book by Attica Locke, a native Houston
Bluebird, Bluebird is one of those novels that I felt was written for me. Published in 2017, this is the fourth book by Attica Locke, a native Houstonian who after nearly fifteen years as a highly sought-after screenwriter (on projects that all went unproduced), began moonlighting in mystery fiction, using the geography, culture and racial divides of East Texas to inform her stories. Like Tana French, Locke writes literary novels that happen to involve a homicide investigation. Her ability to unlock doors mysterious to me even as a Texan and her examination of what it means to be a Texan in today's political climate are two of her greatest strengths.
Darren Mathews has been suspended from the Texas Rangers pending a grand jury investigation. Ignoring a plea from his wife Lisa, Darren drove to San Jacinto County to help Rutherford "Mack" McMillan, the caretaker of the Mathews family house in Camilla. With Mack's granddaughter being terrorized by a no-account cracker named Ronnie Malvo, an armed standoff ensued and two days later, Malvo was found dead in a ditch, shot by a .38 like the one Mack had pointed at the dead man. While Darren's career dangles by a thread, he separates from Lisa, who wants him to resign from law enforcement and return to law school like the Princeton grad she married.
Darren receives a call from Greg Heglund, an FBI agent that he went to private high school with in Houston. Itching for a "come-up" that will advance his career and get him out of the Houston field office, Greg asks Darren to look into a double-homicide in Shelby County, where the town of "Lark" has produced two dead bodies in six days despite having a population of two hundred folks. Located off U.S. Highway 59--the north-south route that has long carried blacks to visit family, or in some cases, completely out of state for jobs or an environment less hostile to them--Darren is in many ways going home.
He was Texas-bred on both sides, going all the way back to slavery. Since Reconstruction, no one had ever left the piney woods of the eastern edge of the state save for a few uncles and cousins fleeing the law on his mother's side. Her people stayed because they were poor; the Mathewses stayed because they were not. From early on, they owned farm-rich land, bequeathed by the same man who gave his favored slaves the surname Mathews, or so the legend went, and black folks didn't just up and leave that kind of wealth to start over someplace foreign and cold. No, the Mathewes dug deeper into the soil, planting cotton and corn and the roots of a family that would be theirs alone--and not a pecuniary unit, convertible to cash at will. They farmed hard and made enough to raise generations of men and woman and send dozens of them to college and graduate school; they made a life that could rival what was possible in Chicago or Detroit or Gary, Indiana. They were not willing to cede an entire state to the hatred of a bunch of nut-scratching, tobacco-spitting crackers. Money allowed for that choice, sure it did. But money also demanded something of them, and the Mathewes were willing to give it. They built a colored school in Camilla, offered small-business loans to colored folks when they could, and dedicated their lives to public service, becoming teachers and country doctors and lawyers and agitators when the times called for it.
What they were not going to be was run off.
Darren is struck that the sequence of deaths in Lark--a black male from Chicago traveling alone and a white female who works at a local icehouse--buck the historical trend in the South: a white lady's real or imagined assault followed by the murder of a black man. Michael Wright was a thirty-five-year-old lawyer who grew up in nearby Tyler and for reasons unknown, had returned home. His body found decomposing in the bayou, Michael's death is presumed to be robbery by the sheriff, who fears the attention a hate crime would bring, but Missy was married to Keith Avery Dale, an ex-con whose prison record is a red flag for affiliation with the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas.
Leaving his badge in his truck, Darren finds Lark divided along racial lines, with Geneva Sweet's Sweets offering home cooking and haircuts to black travelers and Jeff's Juice House, where Missy Dale worked, a hangout for whites. With Missy's body discovered in the bayou behind Geneva's, the sheriff is operating on the theory that the perpetrator is black. Little urgency has been placed in finding Michael Wright's killer despite the presence of his estranged wife Randie Winston seeking answers. A photographer, Randie has zero sensitivity for southern social norms, but Darren recognizes a kindred spirit whose spouse was also uncomfortable with her long working hours.
Nosing around the two homicides and doing his best to salvage his marriage in spite of it, Darren confronts questions that have long divided his family. His father killed in Vietnam and his mother a deadbeat alcoholic, Darren was raised by his twin uncles William and Clayton, a Texas Ranger and a defense attorney, respectively. While William--shot and killed during a traffic stop--long maintained that the law would achieve parity and justice for blacks, Clayton disagreed, believing the law to be a lie that has always been used to oppress blacks and must be challenged. Randie is incredulous that Michael or Darren feel partial to a place that doesn't seem to want them.
"He should never have come down here," she said, her hands balled into fists, the bottoms of which were pressed into the thighs of her jeans, as if she were holding tight to an invisible buoy, as if she believed her anger at Michael might keep her from sinking into the tide of grief that had only begun to lick at her toes. "What the hell did he think was going to happen in a place like this?"
"Coming home is not asking for it."
"This was not his home," she said.
But it was, and Darren understood that in a way Randie didn't. Not Lark, of course, but this thin slice of the state that had built both of them, Darren and Michael. The red dirt of East Texas ran in both their veins. Darren knew the power of home, knew what it meant to stand on the land where your forefathers had forged your future out of dirt, knew the power of what could be loved up by hand, how a harvest could change a fate. He knew what it felt like to stand on the back porch of his family homestead in Camilla and feel the breath of his ancestors in the trees, feel the power of gratitude in every stray breeze. He wanted to say all this and more to Randie. But she was closed off by then, sitting rigid, her chin jutted forward an aggrieved anger that would never hold. God help her, Darren thought, when that wall comes down and the hurt comes calling.
Bluebird, Bluebird does often feel like issues or concerns in search of a story. The most compelling material involves Darren Mathews' family history, his decision to join the Texas Rangers and struggle to maintain his marriage along with it. The murder mystery is necessary to expose the reader to secrets lurking in Lark and some of the crime solving has the convinient nature of a '70s cop show to it. What Locke does is investigate a crime from a completely fresh point of view, with the anxieties and aspirations and secrets specific to blacks in East Texas at the forefront of her storytelling, which is filled with marvelous prose.
He told Randie he had to make a call, mumbling something about his lieutenant, anything to grant him a few minutes alone to read the medical examiner's report. He could not take in the information and protect her from it at the same time. He would tell her what he had to and no more. He left as a John Lee Hooker record dropped on the jukebox, and Randie sank into the booth below the guitar, staring at the Les Paul. Bluebird, bluebird, take this letter down South for me, Hooker sang as Darren opened the cafe's front door, the bell clinking behind him. The air outside stung the sweat breaking out across his forehead. He stepped into the cab of his truck, warm from the midday sun. The file came attached to an e-mail that reported that Missy Dale's final examination was still in progress at the Dallas County Medical Examiner's office.
Darren opened the file on Michael Wright.
In addition to writing descriptions that deliver the food, weather and blues of East Texas as a sensory feast, Locke makes a sound decision introducing a cop under grand jury investigation. Darren's role in covering up Malvo's murder or possibly even pulling the trigger is not resolved until the final pages and through watching how his character juggles morality versus legality, I became a juror weighing his culpability. While the book doesn't implicate the acting president in the behavior of its racist deplorables, it does flip over the rock of American society and reveal the snakes that Barack Obama's presidency, despite its hopes, seemed to do little to exterminate. ...more
Darren Mathews has been suspended from the Texas Rangers pending a grand jury investigation. Ignoring a plea from his wife Lisa, Darren drove to San Jacinto County to help Rutherford "Mack" McMillan, the caretaker of the Mathews family house in Camilla. With Mack's granddaughter being terrorized by a no-account cracker named Ronnie Malvo, an armed standoff ensued and two days later, Malvo was found dead in a ditch, shot by a .38 like the one Mack had pointed at the dead man. While Darren's career dangles by a thread, he separates from Lisa, who wants him to resign from law enforcement and return to law school like the Princeton grad she married.
Darren receives a call from Greg Heglund, an FBI agent that he went to private high school with in Houston. Itching for a "come-up" that will advance his career and get him out of the Houston field office, Greg asks Darren to look into a double-homicide in Shelby County, where the town of "Lark" has produced two dead bodies in six days despite having a population of two hundred folks. Located off U.S. Highway 59--the north-south route that has long carried blacks to visit family, or in some cases, completely out of state for jobs or an environment less hostile to them--Darren is in many ways going home.
He was Texas-bred on both sides, going all the way back to slavery. Since Reconstruction, no one had ever left the piney woods of the eastern edge of the state save for a few uncles and cousins fleeing the law on his mother's side. Her people stayed because they were poor; the Mathewses stayed because they were not. From early on, they owned farm-rich land, bequeathed by the same man who gave his favored slaves the surname Mathews, or so the legend went, and black folks didn't just up and leave that kind of wealth to start over someplace foreign and cold. No, the Mathewes dug deeper into the soil, planting cotton and corn and the roots of a family that would be theirs alone--and not a pecuniary unit, convertible to cash at will. They farmed hard and made enough to raise generations of men and woman and send dozens of them to college and graduate school; they made a life that could rival what was possible in Chicago or Detroit or Gary, Indiana. They were not willing to cede an entire state to the hatred of a bunch of nut-scratching, tobacco-spitting crackers. Money allowed for that choice, sure it did. But money also demanded something of them, and the Mathewes were willing to give it. They built a colored school in Camilla, offered small-business loans to colored folks when they could, and dedicated their lives to public service, becoming teachers and country doctors and lawyers and agitators when the times called for it.
What they were not going to be was run off.
Darren is struck that the sequence of deaths in Lark--a black male from Chicago traveling alone and a white female who works at a local icehouse--buck the historical trend in the South: a white lady's real or imagined assault followed by the murder of a black man. Michael Wright was a thirty-five-year-old lawyer who grew up in nearby Tyler and for reasons unknown, had returned home. His body found decomposing in the bayou, Michael's death is presumed to be robbery by the sheriff, who fears the attention a hate crime would bring, but Missy was married to Keith Avery Dale, an ex-con whose prison record is a red flag for affiliation with the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas.
Leaving his badge in his truck, Darren finds Lark divided along racial lines, with Geneva Sweet's Sweets offering home cooking and haircuts to black travelers and Jeff's Juice House, where Missy Dale worked, a hangout for whites. With Missy's body discovered in the bayou behind Geneva's, the sheriff is operating on the theory that the perpetrator is black. Little urgency has been placed in finding Michael Wright's killer despite the presence of his estranged wife Randie Winston seeking answers. A photographer, Randie has zero sensitivity for southern social norms, but Darren recognizes a kindred spirit whose spouse was also uncomfortable with her long working hours.
Nosing around the two homicides and doing his best to salvage his marriage in spite of it, Darren confronts questions that have long divided his family. His father killed in Vietnam and his mother a deadbeat alcoholic, Darren was raised by his twin uncles William and Clayton, a Texas Ranger and a defense attorney, respectively. While William--shot and killed during a traffic stop--long maintained that the law would achieve parity and justice for blacks, Clayton disagreed, believing the law to be a lie that has always been used to oppress blacks and must be challenged. Randie is incredulous that Michael or Darren feel partial to a place that doesn't seem to want them.
"He should never have come down here," she said, her hands balled into fists, the bottoms of which were pressed into the thighs of her jeans, as if she were holding tight to an invisible buoy, as if she believed her anger at Michael might keep her from sinking into the tide of grief that had only begun to lick at her toes. "What the hell did he think was going to happen in a place like this?"
"Coming home is not asking for it."
"This was not his home," she said.
But it was, and Darren understood that in a way Randie didn't. Not Lark, of course, but this thin slice of the state that had built both of them, Darren and Michael. The red dirt of East Texas ran in both their veins. Darren knew the power of home, knew what it meant to stand on the land where your forefathers had forged your future out of dirt, knew the power of what could be loved up by hand, how a harvest could change a fate. He knew what it felt like to stand on the back porch of his family homestead in Camilla and feel the breath of his ancestors in the trees, feel the power of gratitude in every stray breeze. He wanted to say all this and more to Randie. But she was closed off by then, sitting rigid, her chin jutted forward an aggrieved anger that would never hold. God help her, Darren thought, when that wall comes down and the hurt comes calling.
Bluebird, Bluebird does often feel like issues or concerns in search of a story. The most compelling material involves Darren Mathews' family history, his decision to join the Texas Rangers and struggle to maintain his marriage along with it. The murder mystery is necessary to expose the reader to secrets lurking in Lark and some of the crime solving has the convinient nature of a '70s cop show to it. What Locke does is investigate a crime from a completely fresh point of view, with the anxieties and aspirations and secrets specific to blacks in East Texas at the forefront of her storytelling, which is filled with marvelous prose.
He told Randie he had to make a call, mumbling something about his lieutenant, anything to grant him a few minutes alone to read the medical examiner's report. He could not take in the information and protect her from it at the same time. He would tell her what he had to and no more. He left as a John Lee Hooker record dropped on the jukebox, and Randie sank into the booth below the guitar, staring at the Les Paul. Bluebird, bluebird, take this letter down South for me, Hooker sang as Darren opened the cafe's front door, the bell clinking behind him. The air outside stung the sweat breaking out across his forehead. He stepped into the cab of his truck, warm from the midday sun. The file came attached to an e-mail that reported that Missy Dale's final examination was still in progress at the Dallas County Medical Examiner's office.
Darren opened the file on Michael Wright.
In addition to writing descriptions that deliver the food, weather and blues of East Texas as a sensory feast, Locke makes a sound decision introducing a cop under grand jury investigation. Darren's role in covering up Malvo's murder or possibly even pulling the trigger is not resolved until the final pages and through watching how his character juggles morality versus legality, I became a juror weighing his culpability. While the book doesn't implicate the acting president in the behavior of its racist deplorables, it does flip over the rock of American society and reveal the snakes that Barack Obama's presidency, despite its hopes, seemed to do little to exterminate. ...more
Notes are private!
1
Apr 14, 2019
Apr 16, 2019
Dec 10, 2017
Hardcover
075283455X
9780752834559
075283455X
4.14
25,697
1975
Jan 01, 2000
it was amazing
**spoiler alert** Acidic. Incohesive. Compassionate. Sprawling. Magnanimous. These are words that come to mind reading Terms of Endearment, which comp
**spoiler alert** Acidic. Incohesive. Compassionate. Sprawling. Magnanimous. These are words that come to mind reading Terms of Endearment, which completed Larry McMurtry's so-called Houston Trilogy in 1975, with Moving On and All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers preceding it and a hit movie following. I still feel that McMurtry's novels--at least the three I've read--are too long and suffer in repetition and a lack of focus, a charge that McMurtry is not alone in committing among my favorite authors. The last 47 pages of this novel are nearly their own short story divorced from the rest of the book but are so great as to justify the indulgence.
The story begins in 1962 with Mrs. Aurora Greenwayvisiting scolding advising her only child, a housewife named Emma Horton who in the opinion of her mother, has let her hair, figure, wardrobe and social standard fall by the wayside. When Emma announces that she's going to have a baby, Aurora throws a fit, horribly despondent that no suitor will be interested in wooing her when they discover that the forty-nine year old widow is a grandmother. Emma's husband of two years Thomas "Flap" Horton, an egocentric English professor, is not there to defend his wife through the tirade, though it occurs to Emma he wouldn't have risen to challenge Aurora if he had been there.
When she's not hectoring her daughter, Aurora--who lives in Houston's wealthy River Oaks neighborhood on far less capital than people assume--entertains herself with a parade of suitors. There's Hector, a retired general who lives down the block but tries Aurora's nerve by attempting to regiment her flighty behavior. There's Alberto, an Italian opera star in his twilight whose romantic gestures Aurora is much more tolerant of. Her flirtation even inspires the hopes of Royce, the deliveryman husband of her maid of twenty-two years and best friend, Rosie Dunlop. Aurora returns home to discover that Royce lost his temper with Rosie and hit the mother of his seven children.
"Well, dear, what a mess," she said. "At least we can all thank our lucky stars you weren't pregnant again."
"That's right," Rosie said. "I don't want no more kids by that lowlife bastard."
"Nor anyone else, I hope," Aurora said. "My, you do have a knot on your temple. It's a very bad thing, hitting people on the temple. It doesn't seem like Royce at all. If he had admitted his guilt why was it necessary for him to hit you?"
"Because I was trying to stab him, I reckon," Rosie said. "I took a run at him with the butcher knife. I guess if he hadn't got a lick in first he'd be laying there dead right this minute."
"Good God," Aurora said. The thought of Royce lying lifeless on her kitchen floor, three steps from where he'd eaten so much good food, was almost more than she could handle. Rosie began to dry her eyes and soon was a little calmer.
"Well, my afternoon has not been entirely without adventure, either," Aurora said. "This poor creature is Rosalyn Dunlup. Vernon--Rosie, this is Vernon Dalhart."
A dark horse for Aurora's affection is Vernon Dalhart, a diminutive oilman whose bumper Aurora swipes while returning from breakfast with the general. Vernon, a boyish, laid back millionaire of fifty, has two telephones, a television and an ice cooler in his car, which he uses as his primary residence, docking at the end of each day on the roof of a parking garage he owns in downtown Houston. Vernon tells Aurora that he's in love for the first time in his life, but insecure that he'll tire of her moods quickly and run off to one of his oilfields, Aurora relegates Vernon to the role of Johnny on the Spot, a clutch friend whose resourcefulness she comes to lean on in hard times.
While Emma notices that Flap has been paying her more attention sexually, their marriage is poisoned. Whether her habit of reading the classified ads before any other section of the newspaper is the problem, or his flirtations with Emma's best friend Patsy Carpenter, or that the two hate each other despite bringing a child into the world together, neither of them have the courage to divorce. When Flap finally loses his cool with his bride and tries to push her through their bedroom window, Emma picks herself up and shrugs it off, taking Patsy to her mother's for one of her legendary breakfasts and an update on the soap opera over there.
While Emma has realized a purpose finally in motherhood, Aurora fears that she now lacks any purpose. Realizing that it's only a matter of time before she becomes set in her ways and refuses to let any man close to her, Aurora invites the suitor she deems most promising to her bedroom to view her Renoir (Aurora also owns a Klee, an acquisition of her late mother's which she hates). Rosie's love-hate relationship with her husband and with Fifth Ward finally comes to an end and she moves back home to Shreveport. Emma migrates with her husband to Des Moines, where she gives birth to three children but ultimately, discovers her (view spoiler)[health (hide spoiler)] is more vulnerable than her marriage.
She noticed that everyone in the hospital assumed that she was finished. They were polite; they were not perfunctory, but essentially they let her be. It was her own people, not the doctors, who kept pressuring her to get well enough to go home for a while. They all seemed to think it must be what she wanted, but Emma resisted. If she had had the chance she might have gone home and dug in, but she knew she had no chance--knew it from what she felt, not from what she had been told. Once she accepted that, then she accepted the hospital. For those who could be cured, it was a hospital, but for her it was a depot, a kind of bus station; she was there to be transported out of life, and because it was ugly and bare and smelled bad and was run impersonally by hired functionaries, that which was never easy--a departure--could at least be handled efficiently. She didn't want to go home, because at home the warmth and good smells of her life would be overpowering. Her children would drag at her, with their love, their brilliance, and their needs. She would become vulnerable to her little joys: her soap operas, washing Melanie's fantastic hair, Tommy's newest book and Teddy's hug, a nice dawdle with Richard, some Hollywood gossip from Patsy. If she went home, it would hurt too much to die; also it would hurt those who were losing her.
A strength of Terms of Endearment and Larry McMurtry's epics is their variety. Like the weather in Texas, if you don't like it now, wait. I didn't like the way this book started, with a dominating mother hectoring her meek daughter relentlessly. Once the story begins, McMurtry reveals that Aurora isn't so fearless and Emma isn't so submissive. I loved the brush the author paints the city of Houston with, from the mists that roll in from the Gulf to an all-nite diner near the Astrodome that Vernon Dalhart is partial to. His advisers compel him to give Aurora a pet goat, which seems like something that could only happen in Houston or in a Larry McMurtry novel.
The novel is separated into two books. Emma's Mother sprawls across 349 pages while Mrs. Greenway's Daughter occupies the last 47 pages. I began the last leg incredulous that an author would be so indulgent as to tack on an epilogue when his already long novel had a damn good ending, but the climax to Terms of Endearment turns into one of the most profound and emotionally vibrant exposes on death that I've read. It haunted me to the degree I may not have forgotten the next time I visit a hospital and its power would be hard to gauge if McMurtry hadn't done such a good job of investing me in his characters.
The author reports in a preface written in 1989 that he wanted to write a novel about Aurora Greenway, widow of a certain age in Moving On, but discovering that there was no dilemma to her character at all, invented a daughter, Emma, and gave her one. This makes the novel is disjointed by design. McMurtry's favorite character--Rosie--is my least favorite, but the variety of contrasts available, like a bag of Halloween candy, gave me quite a rush. James L. Brooks adapted and directed a film version in 1983 that won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Brooks drastically, and righteously, streamlined McMurtry's text, cutting characters and creating new ones. ...more
The story begins in 1962 with Mrs. Aurora Greenway
When she's not hectoring her daughter, Aurora--who lives in Houston's wealthy River Oaks neighborhood on far less capital than people assume--entertains herself with a parade of suitors. There's Hector, a retired general who lives down the block but tries Aurora's nerve by attempting to regiment her flighty behavior. There's Alberto, an Italian opera star in his twilight whose romantic gestures Aurora is much more tolerant of. Her flirtation even inspires the hopes of Royce, the deliveryman husband of her maid of twenty-two years and best friend, Rosie Dunlop. Aurora returns home to discover that Royce lost his temper with Rosie and hit the mother of his seven children.
"Well, dear, what a mess," she said. "At least we can all thank our lucky stars you weren't pregnant again."
"That's right," Rosie said. "I don't want no more kids by that lowlife bastard."
"Nor anyone else, I hope," Aurora said. "My, you do have a knot on your temple. It's a very bad thing, hitting people on the temple. It doesn't seem like Royce at all. If he had admitted his guilt why was it necessary for him to hit you?"
"Because I was trying to stab him, I reckon," Rosie said. "I took a run at him with the butcher knife. I guess if he hadn't got a lick in first he'd be laying there dead right this minute."
"Good God," Aurora said. The thought of Royce lying lifeless on her kitchen floor, three steps from where he'd eaten so much good food, was almost more than she could handle. Rosie began to dry her eyes and soon was a little calmer.
"Well, my afternoon has not been entirely without adventure, either," Aurora said. "This poor creature is Rosalyn Dunlup. Vernon--Rosie, this is Vernon Dalhart."
A dark horse for Aurora's affection is Vernon Dalhart, a diminutive oilman whose bumper Aurora swipes while returning from breakfast with the general. Vernon, a boyish, laid back millionaire of fifty, has two telephones, a television and an ice cooler in his car, which he uses as his primary residence, docking at the end of each day on the roof of a parking garage he owns in downtown Houston. Vernon tells Aurora that he's in love for the first time in his life, but insecure that he'll tire of her moods quickly and run off to one of his oilfields, Aurora relegates Vernon to the role of Johnny on the Spot, a clutch friend whose resourcefulness she comes to lean on in hard times.
While Emma notices that Flap has been paying her more attention sexually, their marriage is poisoned. Whether her habit of reading the classified ads before any other section of the newspaper is the problem, or his flirtations with Emma's best friend Patsy Carpenter, or that the two hate each other despite bringing a child into the world together, neither of them have the courage to divorce. When Flap finally loses his cool with his bride and tries to push her through their bedroom window, Emma picks herself up and shrugs it off, taking Patsy to her mother's for one of her legendary breakfasts and an update on the soap opera over there.
While Emma has realized a purpose finally in motherhood, Aurora fears that she now lacks any purpose. Realizing that it's only a matter of time before she becomes set in her ways and refuses to let any man close to her, Aurora invites the suitor she deems most promising to her bedroom to view her Renoir (Aurora also owns a Klee, an acquisition of her late mother's which she hates). Rosie's love-hate relationship with her husband and with Fifth Ward finally comes to an end and she moves back home to Shreveport. Emma migrates with her husband to Des Moines, where she gives birth to three children but ultimately, discovers her (view spoiler)[health (hide spoiler)] is more vulnerable than her marriage.
She noticed that everyone in the hospital assumed that she was finished. They were polite; they were not perfunctory, but essentially they let her be. It was her own people, not the doctors, who kept pressuring her to get well enough to go home for a while. They all seemed to think it must be what she wanted, but Emma resisted. If she had had the chance she might have gone home and dug in, but she knew she had no chance--knew it from what she felt, not from what she had been told. Once she accepted that, then she accepted the hospital. For those who could be cured, it was a hospital, but for her it was a depot, a kind of bus station; she was there to be transported out of life, and because it was ugly and bare and smelled bad and was run impersonally by hired functionaries, that which was never easy--a departure--could at least be handled efficiently. She didn't want to go home, because at home the warmth and good smells of her life would be overpowering. Her children would drag at her, with their love, their brilliance, and their needs. She would become vulnerable to her little joys: her soap operas, washing Melanie's fantastic hair, Tommy's newest book and Teddy's hug, a nice dawdle with Richard, some Hollywood gossip from Patsy. If she went home, it would hurt too much to die; also it would hurt those who were losing her.
A strength of Terms of Endearment and Larry McMurtry's epics is their variety. Like the weather in Texas, if you don't like it now, wait. I didn't like the way this book started, with a dominating mother hectoring her meek daughter relentlessly. Once the story begins, McMurtry reveals that Aurora isn't so fearless and Emma isn't so submissive. I loved the brush the author paints the city of Houston with, from the mists that roll in from the Gulf to an all-nite diner near the Astrodome that Vernon Dalhart is partial to. His advisers compel him to give Aurora a pet goat, which seems like something that could only happen in Houston or in a Larry McMurtry novel.
The novel is separated into two books. Emma's Mother sprawls across 349 pages while Mrs. Greenway's Daughter occupies the last 47 pages. I began the last leg incredulous that an author would be so indulgent as to tack on an epilogue when his already long novel had a damn good ending, but the climax to Terms of Endearment turns into one of the most profound and emotionally vibrant exposes on death that I've read. It haunted me to the degree I may not have forgotten the next time I visit a hospital and its power would be hard to gauge if McMurtry hadn't done such a good job of investing me in his characters.
The author reports in a preface written in 1989 that he wanted to write a novel about Aurora Greenway, widow of a certain age in Moving On, but discovering that there was no dilemma to her character at all, invented a daughter, Emma, and gave her one. This makes the novel is disjointed by design. McMurtry's favorite character--Rosie--is my least favorite, but the variety of contrasts available, like a bag of Halloween candy, gave me quite a rush. James L. Brooks adapted and directed a film version in 1983 that won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Brooks drastically, and righteously, streamlined McMurtry's text, cutting characters and creating new ones. ...more
Notes are private!
1
Aug 02, 2017
Aug 06, 2017
Jul 10, 2017
Paperback
4.13
17,335
1997
2003
really liked it
Comanche Moon is the fourth and final entry in a franchise spun from Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize winning western Lonesome Dove. Published in 1997,
Comanche Moon is the fourth and final entry in a franchise spun from Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize winning western Lonesome Dove. Published in 1997, a tone of finality is absent due to the story taking place fifteen to twenty years before the events of McMurtry's magnum opus. His protagonists--Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call--are serving in a company of Texas Rangers charged with protecting settlers along the Rio Grande from Mexican bandits and those on the plains from the Comanche Indians. The writing is superlative, while the necessity of the book and its length are self-indulgent, which may be exactly what hungry fans wanted. They get it.
The epic begins with the company cold, tired and dejected, pressing through sleet on the Llano Estacado under the command of Captain Inish Scull, a tough, adventurous Yankee nicknamed Old Nails due to his habit of picking his teeth with a horseshoe nail. In pursuit of the notorious Comanche horse thief Kicking Wolf, the men are instructed to cover the heads of their horses with sacking to keep the eyelids of their mounts from freezing. The taciturn, work dedicated Call is begged for some sacking by his friend Gus, a romantic idler who was too busy in a whore's tent before their dispatch to do much else but put on his pants.
Alerted to the rangers is the Comanche chief Buffalo Hump, a feared warrior whose oldest son was shot and killed by Call in the Brazos River, earning the ranger the name Gun-in-the-Water. The chief's surviving son, a Comanche-Mexican mongrel named Blue Duck, is as fearless as his father, but exercises none of the judgment, as quick to kill a friendly Kiowa as a Texan. Buffalo Hump criticizes his son for bringing him news rather than a scalp and declines to attack the rangers that Kicking Wolf is responsible for agitating. Attempting to bushwhack Gun-in-the-Water himself, Blue Duck is shot twice by Call and barely escapes. The ranger, merely doing his duty, holds little animosity.
Call had fought the Comanche as hard as any ranger, and yet, when he looked down at them through Captain Scull's glass, saw the women scraping hides and the young men racing their ponies, he felt the same contradictory itch of admiration he had felt the first time he had fought against Buffalo Hump. They were deadly, merciless killers, but they were also the last free Indians on the southern plains. When the last of them had been killed, or their freedom taken from them, their power broken, the plains around him would be a different place. It would be a safer place, or course, but a flavor would have been taken out of it--the flavor of wildness. Of course, it would be a blessing for the settlers, but the settlers weren't the whole story--not quite.
The troop break off their pursuit of Kicking Wolf and head south, where Scull entertains the notion of finding his other adversary: Ahumado, the barbarous Mexican bandit known as the Black Vaquero, who once shot and wounded the captain's magnificent steed Hector. When Kicking Wolf sneaks up on the rangers and steals Hector, Scull promotes Gus and Call to co-captain and instructs them to take the troop home. Scull takes off on foot with their eccentric Kickapoo scout Famous Shoes on a foolhardy adventure to retrieve his horse. Kicking Wolf, meanwhile, decides to deliver his trophy south of the border as a gift to the Black Vaquero in a test of his courage.
In Austin, Gus reunites with his sweetheart, sharp tongued shopkeeper Clara Forsythe, only to learn that her days of waiting on him have ended with her decision to marry a horse trader from North Dakota. Call has a woman, a whore named Maggie Tilton who is carrying his child, but the captain resists all overtures to settle down or even pay Maggie much attention. Captain Scull's rich and flagrant wife Inez takes a break from devouring any able-bodied man in sight to complain to the governor that her husband has abandoned her. Captains McCrae and Call are given orders to go in search of their captain, acquiring one-thousand head of cattle in a ransom to the Black Vaquero.
Joining the expedition is Pea Eye Parker (a scarecrow who Call once rescued from starvation and has become the company's farrier), Joshua Deets (an escaped slave promoted from company cook to tracker) and Jake Spoon (a teenage fop much cozier around women and cards than rangering). Their journey takes them into a border encampment called Lonesome Dove whose potential for variety prove more tempting to Gus than locating their wayward captain. Call feels that rangering offers variety: freezing on the plains and getting scalped by Comanches one week, sweltering in Mexico and getting shot by bandits the next. Besides, there's work left to do.
"Buffalo Hump's held the plains ever since we've been rangers," Call pointed out. "We've never whipped him. And Ahumado's held the border--we've never whipped him either. We can't protect the plains or the border either--that's poor work in my book."
"Woodrow, you're the worst I've ever known for criticizing yourself," Gus said. "We've never rangered with more than a dozen men at a time. Nobody could whip Buffalo Hump or Ahumado with a dozen men."
Call knew that was true, but it didn't change his feeling. The Texas Rangers were supposed to protect settlers on the frontier, but they hadn't. The recent massacres were evidence enough that they weren't succeeding on their job.
"You ought to give up and open a store, if you feel that low about it," Augustus suggested. "There's a need for a store, now that (view spoiler)[the Forsythes are dead (hide spoiler)]. You could marry Mag while you're at it and be comfortable."
"I don't want to run a store or marry either," Call said. "I'd just like to feel that I'm worth the money I'm paid."
"No, what you want is to take a big scalp," Gus said. "Buffalo Hump's or Ahumado's. That's what you want. Me, I'd take the scalp too, but I don't figure it would change much."
"If you kill the jefe it might change something," Call argued.
"No, because somebody else just as mean will soon come along," Gus said.
"Well, we rarely agree," Call said.
"No, but let's go to Mexico anyway," Augustus said. "I'm restless. Let's just saddle up and go tonight. There's a fine moon. Without the boys to slow us down we could make forty miles by morning."
Call felt tempted. He and Augustus at least knew one another's competencies. They would probably fare better alone.
One hundred pages into Comanche Moon, Larry McMurtry became one of my favorite authors. His ability to introduce characters quickly and invest me in them emotionally is bar none. My favorite is a tie between Maggie Tilton, the Austin harlot stoic in the face of not only a Comanche attack, but neglect by the only man she'll ever love, and Famous Shoes, the wily Kickapoo who is the only man on the llano respected by both Buffalo Hump and McCrae & Call. In addition to the wonderful characters, McMurtry's dialogue is like slipping into the banter between old friends while his prose achieves illuminates the bygone world of the American frontier with both wit and introspection.
"What are you doing here?" Buffalo Hump asked, when Famous Shoes walked up. "Your white friends were here but now they have gone south."
"Your son made me come," Famous Shoes replied. "He came with these other boys and made me come. I was on the Canadian, eating a duck. I would not have bothered you if these boys had let me alone. They said you might want to torture me for awhile."
Buffalo Hump was amused. The Kickapoo was an eccentric person who was apt to turn up anywhere on the llano on some outlandish errand that no other Indian would bother about. The man would walk a thousand miles to listen to a certain bird whose call he might want to mimic. Most people thought Famous Shoes was crazy, but Buffalo Hump didn't. Though a Kickapoo, the man had respect for the old ways. He behaved like the old ones behaved; the old ones, too, would go to any lengths to learn some useful fact about the animals or the birds. They would figure that someone might need to know those facts; they themselves might not need to, but their children might, or their grandchildren might.
If spending more time with compelling characters and magnificent prose is justification for itself, then Comanche Moon does that. The novel has an episodic, wandering quality to it, with the author like a tourist in Westworld who just isn't ready to leave the resort yet and wants to cowboy a bit more. The longer the novel goes on, and it goes on for 716 pages, the lack of strong narrative becomes more problematic and I even started skipping through paragraphs once the Mexican adventure was settled. Epic-itis is a bug that afflicts this series and I kept wondering whether a novel that was more focused on story would've had a greater impact on me.
Lonesome Dove cast a long shadow over television, where all four novels were adapted (by Larry McMurtry, or McMurtry & Diana Ossana) and new casts utilized for the characters at different ages. Comanche Moon became a CBS mini-series in 2008 with Steve Zahn as Gus, Karl Urban as Call, Linda Cardellini as Clara Forsythe, Elizabeth Banks as Maggie Tilton, Val Kilmer as Inish Scull, Rachel Griffiths as Inez Scull, Wes Studi as Buffalo Hump and Adam Beach as Blue Duck. Lonesome Dove has made its case for being as mesmerizing a universe for some book and movie lovers as Middle Earth is to others. ...more
The epic begins with the company cold, tired and dejected, pressing through sleet on the Llano Estacado under the command of Captain Inish Scull, a tough, adventurous Yankee nicknamed Old Nails due to his habit of picking his teeth with a horseshoe nail. In pursuit of the notorious Comanche horse thief Kicking Wolf, the men are instructed to cover the heads of their horses with sacking to keep the eyelids of their mounts from freezing. The taciturn, work dedicated Call is begged for some sacking by his friend Gus, a romantic idler who was too busy in a whore's tent before their dispatch to do much else but put on his pants.
Alerted to the rangers is the Comanche chief Buffalo Hump, a feared warrior whose oldest son was shot and killed by Call in the Brazos River, earning the ranger the name Gun-in-the-Water. The chief's surviving son, a Comanche-Mexican mongrel named Blue Duck, is as fearless as his father, but exercises none of the judgment, as quick to kill a friendly Kiowa as a Texan. Buffalo Hump criticizes his son for bringing him news rather than a scalp and declines to attack the rangers that Kicking Wolf is responsible for agitating. Attempting to bushwhack Gun-in-the-Water himself, Blue Duck is shot twice by Call and barely escapes. The ranger, merely doing his duty, holds little animosity.
Call had fought the Comanche as hard as any ranger, and yet, when he looked down at them through Captain Scull's glass, saw the women scraping hides and the young men racing their ponies, he felt the same contradictory itch of admiration he had felt the first time he had fought against Buffalo Hump. They were deadly, merciless killers, but they were also the last free Indians on the southern plains. When the last of them had been killed, or their freedom taken from them, their power broken, the plains around him would be a different place. It would be a safer place, or course, but a flavor would have been taken out of it--the flavor of wildness. Of course, it would be a blessing for the settlers, but the settlers weren't the whole story--not quite.
The troop break off their pursuit of Kicking Wolf and head south, where Scull entertains the notion of finding his other adversary: Ahumado, the barbarous Mexican bandit known as the Black Vaquero, who once shot and wounded the captain's magnificent steed Hector. When Kicking Wolf sneaks up on the rangers and steals Hector, Scull promotes Gus and Call to co-captain and instructs them to take the troop home. Scull takes off on foot with their eccentric Kickapoo scout Famous Shoes on a foolhardy adventure to retrieve his horse. Kicking Wolf, meanwhile, decides to deliver his trophy south of the border as a gift to the Black Vaquero in a test of his courage.
In Austin, Gus reunites with his sweetheart, sharp tongued shopkeeper Clara Forsythe, only to learn that her days of waiting on him have ended with her decision to marry a horse trader from North Dakota. Call has a woman, a whore named Maggie Tilton who is carrying his child, but the captain resists all overtures to settle down or even pay Maggie much attention. Captain Scull's rich and flagrant wife Inez takes a break from devouring any able-bodied man in sight to complain to the governor that her husband has abandoned her. Captains McCrae and Call are given orders to go in search of their captain, acquiring one-thousand head of cattle in a ransom to the Black Vaquero.
Joining the expedition is Pea Eye Parker (a scarecrow who Call once rescued from starvation and has become the company's farrier), Joshua Deets (an escaped slave promoted from company cook to tracker) and Jake Spoon (a teenage fop much cozier around women and cards than rangering). Their journey takes them into a border encampment called Lonesome Dove whose potential for variety prove more tempting to Gus than locating their wayward captain. Call feels that rangering offers variety: freezing on the plains and getting scalped by Comanches one week, sweltering in Mexico and getting shot by bandits the next. Besides, there's work left to do.
"Buffalo Hump's held the plains ever since we've been rangers," Call pointed out. "We've never whipped him. And Ahumado's held the border--we've never whipped him either. We can't protect the plains or the border either--that's poor work in my book."
"Woodrow, you're the worst I've ever known for criticizing yourself," Gus said. "We've never rangered with more than a dozen men at a time. Nobody could whip Buffalo Hump or Ahumado with a dozen men."
Call knew that was true, but it didn't change his feeling. The Texas Rangers were supposed to protect settlers on the frontier, but they hadn't. The recent massacres were evidence enough that they weren't succeeding on their job.
"You ought to give up and open a store, if you feel that low about it," Augustus suggested. "There's a need for a store, now that (view spoiler)[the Forsythes are dead (hide spoiler)]. You could marry Mag while you're at it and be comfortable."
"I don't want to run a store or marry either," Call said. "I'd just like to feel that I'm worth the money I'm paid."
"No, what you want is to take a big scalp," Gus said. "Buffalo Hump's or Ahumado's. That's what you want. Me, I'd take the scalp too, but I don't figure it would change much."
"If you kill the jefe it might change something," Call argued.
"No, because somebody else just as mean will soon come along," Gus said.
"Well, we rarely agree," Call said.
"No, but let's go to Mexico anyway," Augustus said. "I'm restless. Let's just saddle up and go tonight. There's a fine moon. Without the boys to slow us down we could make forty miles by morning."
Call felt tempted. He and Augustus at least knew one another's competencies. They would probably fare better alone.
One hundred pages into Comanche Moon, Larry McMurtry became one of my favorite authors. His ability to introduce characters quickly and invest me in them emotionally is bar none. My favorite is a tie between Maggie Tilton, the Austin harlot stoic in the face of not only a Comanche attack, but neglect by the only man she'll ever love, and Famous Shoes, the wily Kickapoo who is the only man on the llano respected by both Buffalo Hump and McCrae & Call. In addition to the wonderful characters, McMurtry's dialogue is like slipping into the banter between old friends while his prose achieves illuminates the bygone world of the American frontier with both wit and introspection.
"What are you doing here?" Buffalo Hump asked, when Famous Shoes walked up. "Your white friends were here but now they have gone south."
"Your son made me come," Famous Shoes replied. "He came with these other boys and made me come. I was on the Canadian, eating a duck. I would not have bothered you if these boys had let me alone. They said you might want to torture me for awhile."
Buffalo Hump was amused. The Kickapoo was an eccentric person who was apt to turn up anywhere on the llano on some outlandish errand that no other Indian would bother about. The man would walk a thousand miles to listen to a certain bird whose call he might want to mimic. Most people thought Famous Shoes was crazy, but Buffalo Hump didn't. Though a Kickapoo, the man had respect for the old ways. He behaved like the old ones behaved; the old ones, too, would go to any lengths to learn some useful fact about the animals or the birds. They would figure that someone might need to know those facts; they themselves might not need to, but their children might, or their grandchildren might.
If spending more time with compelling characters and magnificent prose is justification for itself, then Comanche Moon does that. The novel has an episodic, wandering quality to it, with the author like a tourist in Westworld who just isn't ready to leave the resort yet and wants to cowboy a bit more. The longer the novel goes on, and it goes on for 716 pages, the lack of strong narrative becomes more problematic and I even started skipping through paragraphs once the Mexican adventure was settled. Epic-itis is a bug that afflicts this series and I kept wondering whether a novel that was more focused on story would've had a greater impact on me.
Lonesome Dove cast a long shadow over television, where all four novels were adapted (by Larry McMurtry, or McMurtry & Diana Ossana) and new casts utilized for the characters at different ages. Comanche Moon became a CBS mini-series in 2008 with Steve Zahn as Gus, Karl Urban as Call, Linda Cardellini as Clara Forsythe, Elizabeth Banks as Maggie Tilton, Val Kilmer as Inish Scull, Rachel Griffiths as Inez Scull, Wes Studi as Buffalo Hump and Adam Beach as Blue Duck. Lonesome Dove has made its case for being as mesmerizing a universe for some book and movie lovers as Middle Earth is to others. ...more
Notes are private!
1
Jul 20, 2017
Jul 29, 2017
Jul 10, 2017
Paperback
0684853868
9780684853864
0684853868
4.00
19,108
1966
Jan 14, 1999
it was amazing
The moment when The Last Picture Show became one of my favorite books occurs on page 75. Larry McMurtry describes an orange bulb glowing over the back
The moment when The Last Picture Show became one of my favorite books occurs on page 75. Larry McMurtry describes an orange bulb glowing over the back seat of a school bus and the amorous activities of the two seniors sitting underneath it, but as he does through much of his sometimes poignant, sometimes flagrant, ultimately magnificent coming-of-age novel published in 1966, the state of being a teenager in the northern plains of Texas of the early 1950s is what McMurtry is writing about. In any other place or time, the orange bulb would be inconsequential, but McMurtry shows me why it is so much more. Like the bulb, he partially illuminates an entire world.
The novel focuses on Sonny Crawford, a soft spoken high school senior in the town of Thalia, where you'll find one street (Main) with any businesses on it. Three of them--the pool hall, the diner and the picture show--are owned by Sam the Lion, a stoic old bachelor who for lack of a family looks after the boys who have none to speak of. This includes a mute bastard named Billy abandoned as a child in front of the movie theater, but also Sonny and his best friend Duane Jackson, an All-Conference fullback who roughnecks with a local drilling crew and lives in the boarding house with Sonny, who makes a living driving a butane truck for Fartley Butane and Propane.
Sonny and Duane share a '41 Chevy pickup between them and rotate when Sonny can use the cab to court a smug sophomore, or Duane needs it to neck with his girlfriend Jacy Farrow, whose father got rich in the oil patch and is regarded as the prettiest girl in town. Duane dreams of the day he and Jacy will be married and can perform conjugal activities together, unaware that his girl views him as a distraction from boredom and a tool against her mother Lois, the fiercest woman in town. Lois' idea of a suitable boy is Lester Marlow, a citified geek who succeeds in luring Jacy away from a dance at the American Legion Hall to a pool party in Wichita Falls, where the rich kids attend naked.
Jacy and Lester had not been gone from the dance ten minutes before word got around that they were going to a swimming party where everyone would be naked. The reason word got around so fast was that Lester told several of the younger kids about it just before he left. He told them he and Jacy were going to swim naked, just like everybody else. It was almost past belief, but when the kids saw him actually drive away with Jacy they instantly believed it and began to talk about it. Nothing wilder had ever been heard of in Thalia--it was even wilder than actually making out, because that was customarily done in the dark and nothing much could be seen.
In no time there were groups of excited boys standing around, speculating about the look of Jacy's breasts. They even had a hot argument over whether or not blond girls really had blond hair underneath their panties. Some of the younger, illiterate kids thought that all women had black hair in that particular place, but the better-read youths convinced them otherwise by reference to the panty-dropping scene in I the Jury, a book the local drugstore could never keep in stock.
While Duane experiences the ups and downs of dating a local celebrity, Sonny finds himself without a girl to court. The only other woman in Thalia he lusts in any way after is Genevieve, a punchy waitress pulling down all-night shifts at the diner while her roughneck husband recuperates from an injury. That changes when Coach Popper offers to get Sonny out of his afternoon classes if he'll drive the coach's wife Ruth to a doctor's appointment in Olney. As delicate as a mouse and almost as rarely seen, Ruth finds companionship she desperately needs in Sonny while the boys finds something he desperately needs alone with Ruth.
Meanwhile, Jacy begins sneaking away from Duane to cavort with the senior nudists in Wichita Falls every chance she gets. She determines to make their host Bobby Sheen fall in love with her and comes close one late night, until Bobby discovers Jacy is a virgin. Determined to give her backward and country image a makeover, Jacy determines to lose her virginity to Duane on the senior trip to San Francisco. The only kink in her strategy is Duane, who might not agree to the breakup so easily. Jacy considers becoming more friendly with Sonny and using him to make Duane jealous. When she learns about Sonny and Ruth Popper, Jacy determines to put that romance on ice.
Duane is so sick of Thalia he proposes to Sonny that they take off. With donations from Genevieve and Sam the Lion, the boys drive the furthest they've ever been away from home, to Matamoros, but their adventure south of the border brings more sorrow than it does excitement. Following the senior trip, Jacy activates her battle plan against both Duane and Sonny, but she too discovers that rather than feel empowered by sex, she seems lonelier than ever. (view spoiler)[Sam the Lion dies from a massive stroke at the poolhall (hide spoiler)] and while Sonny and Billy inherit the poolhall, the picture is ultimately forced to turn out the lights for good. The changes confuse Billy a great deal.
All through October, then through November, Billy missed the show. Sonny didn't know what to do about it, but it was a bad time in general and he didn't know what to do about himself either. He had taken another lease to pump. He wanted to work harder and tire himself out, so he wouldn't have to lie awake at night and feel alone. Nothing much was happening, and he didn't think much was going to. One day he went to Wichita and bought a television set, thinking it might help Billy, but it didn't at all. Billy would watch it as long as Sonny was around, but the minute Sonny left he left too. He kept going over to the picture show night after night, norther or no norther--he sat on the sidewalk and waited, cold and puzzled. He knew it would open sooner or later, and Sonny couldn't think of no way to make him understand that it wouldn't.
I don't recall high school being nearly as dramatic as portrayed here, while the amount of sex in a time when pregnancy was more difficult to prevent and cast a much greater social stigma strains some credulity in the novel. That said, McMurtry's facility with shaping characters, capturing the landscape of Texas and preserving a certain amount of wit, no matter how tragically some of the events develop is virtuoso. The rose is plain, mostly, only surface thick, like a Young Adult novel. The emotional range of the story is deep. Loneliness lurks in the background, always, even during the hijinks which McMurtry dives the reader into from a very high and dazzling platform.
After civics there was a study hall, and then lunch, a boring time. One year Duane and Jacy had been able to sneak off to the lake and court during lunch, but it was only because Lois Farrow was drinking unusually hard that year and wasn't watching her daughter too closely. Lois was the only woman in Thalia who drank and made no bones about it. That same year Gene Farrow gave a big barbecue out at a little ranch he owned, and all his employees were invited. Duane was roughnecking for Gene then and took Sonny along on his invitation. Lois was there in a low-necked yellow dress, drinking whiskey as fast as most of the roughnecks drank beer. She was also shooting craps with anyone who cared to shoot with her. That was the day that Abilene won over a thousand dollars shooting craps, six hundred of it from Lois and the other four hundred from Lester Marlow, who was Jacy's official date. Lois thought Abilene cheated her and wanted Gene to fire him on the spot, but Gene wouldn't. She cussed them both out, got in her Cadillac, and started for town, but the steering wheel got away from her as the Cadillac was speeding up and she smashed into a mesquite tree. Lois just got out, gave everybody a hard look, and started to town on foot. Nobody stopped her. Gene Farrow got drunk and Abilene kept gambling. While he was rolling dice with Lester, Duane took Jacy over behind some cars and in the excitement got her brassiere off. Sonny himself won $27 in a blackjack game, and he was not even an employee. That night somebody busted Lois' lip and blacked her eye; some thought Gene Farrow did it but others claimed it was Abilene. He had known the Farrows before they were rich, and he wasn't a man to put up with much name calling, and nobody but Lois would have had the guts to call him names in the first place; if there was anything in the world she was scared of nobody knew what it was. She was a tall, rangy blonde, still almost as slim as her daughter, and she was not in the habit of walking around anyone.
Larry McMurtry, who "lovingly" dedicates the book to his hometown, never gets caught writing characters. He documents them. The Last Picture Show alternated me between wanting to spend time in Thalia with these souls, and help them escape. The book received one of the finest film adaptations ever, in 1971. Adapted by McMurtry and Peter Bogdanovich, directed Bogdanovich and filmed in black & white, Timothy Bottoms was cast as Sonny, Jeff Bridges as Duane, Cybil Shepherd as Jacy, Cloris Leachman as Ruth, Eileen Brennan as Genevieve, Ellen Burstyn as Lois Farrow and Ben Johnson as Sam the Lion. Leachman and Johnson both won Academy Awards. ...more
The novel focuses on Sonny Crawford, a soft spoken high school senior in the town of Thalia, where you'll find one street (Main) with any businesses on it. Three of them--the pool hall, the diner and the picture show--are owned by Sam the Lion, a stoic old bachelor who for lack of a family looks after the boys who have none to speak of. This includes a mute bastard named Billy abandoned as a child in front of the movie theater, but also Sonny and his best friend Duane Jackson, an All-Conference fullback who roughnecks with a local drilling crew and lives in the boarding house with Sonny, who makes a living driving a butane truck for Fartley Butane and Propane.
Sonny and Duane share a '41 Chevy pickup between them and rotate when Sonny can use the cab to court a smug sophomore, or Duane needs it to neck with his girlfriend Jacy Farrow, whose father got rich in the oil patch and is regarded as the prettiest girl in town. Duane dreams of the day he and Jacy will be married and can perform conjugal activities together, unaware that his girl views him as a distraction from boredom and a tool against her mother Lois, the fiercest woman in town. Lois' idea of a suitable boy is Lester Marlow, a citified geek who succeeds in luring Jacy away from a dance at the American Legion Hall to a pool party in Wichita Falls, where the rich kids attend naked.
Jacy and Lester had not been gone from the dance ten minutes before word got around that they were going to a swimming party where everyone would be naked. The reason word got around so fast was that Lester told several of the younger kids about it just before he left. He told them he and Jacy were going to swim naked, just like everybody else. It was almost past belief, but when the kids saw him actually drive away with Jacy they instantly believed it and began to talk about it. Nothing wilder had ever been heard of in Thalia--it was even wilder than actually making out, because that was customarily done in the dark and nothing much could be seen.
In no time there were groups of excited boys standing around, speculating about the look of Jacy's breasts. They even had a hot argument over whether or not blond girls really had blond hair underneath their panties. Some of the younger, illiterate kids thought that all women had black hair in that particular place, but the better-read youths convinced them otherwise by reference to the panty-dropping scene in I the Jury, a book the local drugstore could never keep in stock.
While Duane experiences the ups and downs of dating a local celebrity, Sonny finds himself without a girl to court. The only other woman in Thalia he lusts in any way after is Genevieve, a punchy waitress pulling down all-night shifts at the diner while her roughneck husband recuperates from an injury. That changes when Coach Popper offers to get Sonny out of his afternoon classes if he'll drive the coach's wife Ruth to a doctor's appointment in Olney. As delicate as a mouse and almost as rarely seen, Ruth finds companionship she desperately needs in Sonny while the boys finds something he desperately needs alone with Ruth.
Meanwhile, Jacy begins sneaking away from Duane to cavort with the senior nudists in Wichita Falls every chance she gets. She determines to make their host Bobby Sheen fall in love with her and comes close one late night, until Bobby discovers Jacy is a virgin. Determined to give her backward and country image a makeover, Jacy determines to lose her virginity to Duane on the senior trip to San Francisco. The only kink in her strategy is Duane, who might not agree to the breakup so easily. Jacy considers becoming more friendly with Sonny and using him to make Duane jealous. When she learns about Sonny and Ruth Popper, Jacy determines to put that romance on ice.
Duane is so sick of Thalia he proposes to Sonny that they take off. With donations from Genevieve and Sam the Lion, the boys drive the furthest they've ever been away from home, to Matamoros, but their adventure south of the border brings more sorrow than it does excitement. Following the senior trip, Jacy activates her battle plan against both Duane and Sonny, but she too discovers that rather than feel empowered by sex, she seems lonelier than ever. (view spoiler)[Sam the Lion dies from a massive stroke at the poolhall (hide spoiler)] and while Sonny and Billy inherit the poolhall, the picture is ultimately forced to turn out the lights for good. The changes confuse Billy a great deal.
All through October, then through November, Billy missed the show. Sonny didn't know what to do about it, but it was a bad time in general and he didn't know what to do about himself either. He had taken another lease to pump. He wanted to work harder and tire himself out, so he wouldn't have to lie awake at night and feel alone. Nothing much was happening, and he didn't think much was going to. One day he went to Wichita and bought a television set, thinking it might help Billy, but it didn't at all. Billy would watch it as long as Sonny was around, but the minute Sonny left he left too. He kept going over to the picture show night after night, norther or no norther--he sat on the sidewalk and waited, cold and puzzled. He knew it would open sooner or later, and Sonny couldn't think of no way to make him understand that it wouldn't.
I don't recall high school being nearly as dramatic as portrayed here, while the amount of sex in a time when pregnancy was more difficult to prevent and cast a much greater social stigma strains some credulity in the novel. That said, McMurtry's facility with shaping characters, capturing the landscape of Texas and preserving a certain amount of wit, no matter how tragically some of the events develop is virtuoso. The rose is plain, mostly, only surface thick, like a Young Adult novel. The emotional range of the story is deep. Loneliness lurks in the background, always, even during the hijinks which McMurtry dives the reader into from a very high and dazzling platform.
After civics there was a study hall, and then lunch, a boring time. One year Duane and Jacy had been able to sneak off to the lake and court during lunch, but it was only because Lois Farrow was drinking unusually hard that year and wasn't watching her daughter too closely. Lois was the only woman in Thalia who drank and made no bones about it. That same year Gene Farrow gave a big barbecue out at a little ranch he owned, and all his employees were invited. Duane was roughnecking for Gene then and took Sonny along on his invitation. Lois was there in a low-necked yellow dress, drinking whiskey as fast as most of the roughnecks drank beer. She was also shooting craps with anyone who cared to shoot with her. That was the day that Abilene won over a thousand dollars shooting craps, six hundred of it from Lois and the other four hundred from Lester Marlow, who was Jacy's official date. Lois thought Abilene cheated her and wanted Gene to fire him on the spot, but Gene wouldn't. She cussed them both out, got in her Cadillac, and started for town, but the steering wheel got away from her as the Cadillac was speeding up and she smashed into a mesquite tree. Lois just got out, gave everybody a hard look, and started to town on foot. Nobody stopped her. Gene Farrow got drunk and Abilene kept gambling. While he was rolling dice with Lester, Duane took Jacy over behind some cars and in the excitement got her brassiere off. Sonny himself won $27 in a blackjack game, and he was not even an employee. That night somebody busted Lois' lip and blacked her eye; some thought Gene Farrow did it but others claimed it was Abilene. He had known the Farrows before they were rich, and he wasn't a man to put up with much name calling, and nobody but Lois would have had the guts to call him names in the first place; if there was anything in the world she was scared of nobody knew what it was. She was a tall, rangy blonde, still almost as slim as her daughter, and she was not in the habit of walking around anyone.
Larry McMurtry, who "lovingly" dedicates the book to his hometown, never gets caught writing characters. He documents them. The Last Picture Show alternated me between wanting to spend time in Thalia with these souls, and help them escape. The book received one of the finest film adaptations ever, in 1971. Adapted by McMurtry and Peter Bogdanovich, directed Bogdanovich and filmed in black & white, Timothy Bottoms was cast as Sonny, Jeff Bridges as Duane, Cybil Shepherd as Jacy, Cloris Leachman as Ruth, Eileen Brennan as Genevieve, Ellen Burstyn as Lois Farrow and Ben Johnson as Sam the Lion. Leachman and Johnson both won Academy Awards. ...more
Notes are private!
1
Aug 20, 2017
Aug 27, 2017
Jun 22, 2014
Paperback
4.54
201,679
1985
Jul 13, 1985
it was amazing
My introduction to the fiction of Larry McMurtry is Lonesome Dove, consistently ranked as one of the best westerns whether the conversation is print o
My introduction to the fiction of Larry McMurtry is Lonesome Dove, consistently ranked as one of the best westerns whether the conversation is print or television. Published the year of the Texas Sesquicentennial in 1985 and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction the following year, the magnum opus is a magnificent exploration of male friendship, with a dozen supporting characters of both genders who McMurtry could've dedicated a novella to (and often attempts to over 857 pages). The bantering becomes a beast of its own and the story padding crosses over into self-indulgence, but there's no question that there's a masterful novel in here.
Somewhere along the border of Texas and Mexico in the late 1870s lies the town of Lonesome Dove, which consists of little more than a dry saloon and a livery stable. The stable is operated by two retired Texas Rangers: a romantic idler named Augustus McCrae and the taciturn, hard driving Captain Woodrow F. Call. A two-time widower and a bachelor, respectively, the men lead Joshua Deets (a black scout from their rangering days), Peaeye Parker (an ex-ranger who is loyal but none too bright), Newt Dobbs (the seventeen year old progeny of a prostitute and in all likelihood, Call) and Bolivar (an ill-tempered cook who enjoys clanging the dinner bell with a crowbar).
Having dedicated their prime to eliminating the threat of Comanche Indians or Mexican bandits to Texas, Gus and Call have spent nine years operating the Hat Creek Cattle Company, stabling horses, stealing fresh ones south of the border for sale and little else. When he's not drinking whiskey on the porch or jawing, Augustus visits the Dry Bean for a card game or a poke with the town's sporting lady, a cool blonde named Lorena Wood who dreams of traveling to San Francisco, but needs a dependable man to get her there. Call, whose favorite pastime is sitting at the river crossing after dinner hoping he might catch a horse thief, hungers for a challenge.
Call was not a man to daydream--that was Gus's department--but then it wasn't really daydreaming he did, alone on the little bluff at night. It was just thinking back to the years when a man who presumed to stake out a Comanche trail would do well to keep his rifle cocked. Yet the fact that he had taken to thinking back annoyed him, too: he didn't want to start working over his memories, like an old man. Sometimes he would force himself to get up and walk two or three more miles up the river and back, just to get the memories out of his head. Not until he felt alert again--felt that he could still captain if the need arose--would he return to Lonesome Dove.
The next morning, Deets returns from San Antonio with Jake Spoon, a comrade from their rangering days whose love for ladies and aversion to work has led him to a career as a gambler. Jake had overstayed his welcome in Fort Smith, Arkansas when an argument with a mule skinner led to the accidental shooting of the town dentist, brother to the sheriff. Jake beats it to Lonesome Dove for the protection of his old friends. Lorena falls under the spell of the rogue, wounding the heart of a top cowhand named Dish Boggett who's in love with her, while Call is seduced by Jake's tales of pristine territory he's scouted in Montana, wide open to a ranching operation.
Receiving an order for forty horses from a cattleman driving his herd to Nebraska, the men cross into Mexico, where it's Call's mission to steal one hundred horses, buy some cattle and drive them to Montana to make their own fortune. Their stolen ponies collide with a herd driven south by horse thieves, multiplying their holdings. Call begins hiring hands and convinces Gus--who realizes there won't be anyone left to talk to but the pigs--to come along on the journey. Jake prefers a card game to work or to keeping his promise to take Lorena to San Francisco, but Gus convinces him to accompany her and them as far as Denver, knowing it would satisfy Lorena, entertain himself and infuriate Call.
Dangers on the trail include sand storms, stampedes, lightning strikes, nests of water moccasins in a swollen river and a barbarous Comanchero named Blue Duck, who abducts Lorena while Jake is off gambling. Rescued by Gus, her recovery is complicated by the discovery that he intends to reunite with an old flame in Nebraska named Clara Allen, the love he never got over. Meanwhile, a young sheriff from Fort Smith named July Johnson goes to Texas with his stepson Joe to bring Jake Spoon to justice. His hapless deputy Roscoe Brown goes after them once his boss's wife Elmira Boot Johnson promptly vanishes, headed for Nebraska with buffalo hunters to find her first husband.
The whiskey boat stank, and the men on it stank, but Elmira was not sorry she had taken the passage. She had a tiny little cubbyhole among the whiskey casks, with a few planks and some buffalo skins thrown over it to keep the rain out, but she spent most of her time sitting at the rear of the boat, watching the endless flow of brown water. Some days were so hot that the air above the water shimmered and the shore become indistinct; others days a chill rain blew and she wrapped herself in one of the buffalo robes and kept fairly dry. The rain was welcome, for it discouraged the fleas. They made her sleep uneasy, but it was a small price to pay for escaping from Fort Smith. She had lived where there were fleas before, and worse things than fleas.
McMurtry's indulgences with epic storytelling and the tendency of his minor characters to behave like idiots--their misplaced devotion leading them on foolhardy quests in pursuit of lovers who want nothing more of them--seem to go hand in hand. I could have done without the July Johnson and Elmira Boot subplots. McMurtry's banter as instigated by Gus is often amusing, sometimes profound, but there's too much of it. The overkill is balanced by the tremendous appeal of Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call, the archetypal visionary and practical man. Their company is stocked with archetypes I recognized, co-workers who were far from Texas Rangers or even cowboys but exhibited many of the same qualities as Deets, Pea or Jake Spoon.
McMurtry's facility with dialogue, character and description all brought to bear on Lonesome Dove. In addition to his terrific banter-- where men debate whether it is pigs or horses who are smarter or work through the great mysteries of women or death--I liked how devoted McMurtry was to exploring the relationship between two men. Like a marriage, Gus and Call love each other, but are getting fed up. I saw quite a bit of myself in the character of Woodrow Call, a gift for an author to pull off. As antagonists go, Blue Duck has no equal. The period detail is spare but I felt I had an extremely clear proscenium on what the Old West was like as McMurtry took me through it.
In 1972 after adapting his novel The Last Picture Show to screen, Larry McMurtry was approached by its director Peter Bogdanovich to script a western for him. The Streets of Laredo was envisioned as a deconstruction, with cowboys facing their mortality. The conceit was to cast James Stewart, John Wayne and Henry Fonda as Gus, Call and Jake Spoon but Wayne had second thoughts about razing the genre he helped build and the project stalled. Twelve years later, McMurtry bought the rights to his script treatment and developed Lonesome Dove. Its publishing success spurred an acclaimed four-part television mini-series on CBS in 1989 with Robert Duvall as Gus, Tommy Lee Jones as Call, Danny Glover as Deets, the enduring Diane Lane as Lorena and Robert Urich as Jake Spoon. ...more
Somewhere along the border of Texas and Mexico in the late 1870s lies the town of Lonesome Dove, which consists of little more than a dry saloon and a livery stable. The stable is operated by two retired Texas Rangers: a romantic idler named Augustus McCrae and the taciturn, hard driving Captain Woodrow F. Call. A two-time widower and a bachelor, respectively, the men lead Joshua Deets (a black scout from their rangering days), Peaeye Parker (an ex-ranger who is loyal but none too bright), Newt Dobbs (the seventeen year old progeny of a prostitute and in all likelihood, Call) and Bolivar (an ill-tempered cook who enjoys clanging the dinner bell with a crowbar).
Having dedicated their prime to eliminating the threat of Comanche Indians or Mexican bandits to Texas, Gus and Call have spent nine years operating the Hat Creek Cattle Company, stabling horses, stealing fresh ones south of the border for sale and little else. When he's not drinking whiskey on the porch or jawing, Augustus visits the Dry Bean for a card game or a poke with the town's sporting lady, a cool blonde named Lorena Wood who dreams of traveling to San Francisco, but needs a dependable man to get her there. Call, whose favorite pastime is sitting at the river crossing after dinner hoping he might catch a horse thief, hungers for a challenge.
Call was not a man to daydream--that was Gus's department--but then it wasn't really daydreaming he did, alone on the little bluff at night. It was just thinking back to the years when a man who presumed to stake out a Comanche trail would do well to keep his rifle cocked. Yet the fact that he had taken to thinking back annoyed him, too: he didn't want to start working over his memories, like an old man. Sometimes he would force himself to get up and walk two or three more miles up the river and back, just to get the memories out of his head. Not until he felt alert again--felt that he could still captain if the need arose--would he return to Lonesome Dove.
The next morning, Deets returns from San Antonio with Jake Spoon, a comrade from their rangering days whose love for ladies and aversion to work has led him to a career as a gambler. Jake had overstayed his welcome in Fort Smith, Arkansas when an argument with a mule skinner led to the accidental shooting of the town dentist, brother to the sheriff. Jake beats it to Lonesome Dove for the protection of his old friends. Lorena falls under the spell of the rogue, wounding the heart of a top cowhand named Dish Boggett who's in love with her, while Call is seduced by Jake's tales of pristine territory he's scouted in Montana, wide open to a ranching operation.
Receiving an order for forty horses from a cattleman driving his herd to Nebraska, the men cross into Mexico, where it's Call's mission to steal one hundred horses, buy some cattle and drive them to Montana to make their own fortune. Their stolen ponies collide with a herd driven south by horse thieves, multiplying their holdings. Call begins hiring hands and convinces Gus--who realizes there won't be anyone left to talk to but the pigs--to come along on the journey. Jake prefers a card game to work or to keeping his promise to take Lorena to San Francisco, but Gus convinces him to accompany her and them as far as Denver, knowing it would satisfy Lorena, entertain himself and infuriate Call.
Dangers on the trail include sand storms, stampedes, lightning strikes, nests of water moccasins in a swollen river and a barbarous Comanchero named Blue Duck, who abducts Lorena while Jake is off gambling. Rescued by Gus, her recovery is complicated by the discovery that he intends to reunite with an old flame in Nebraska named Clara Allen, the love he never got over. Meanwhile, a young sheriff from Fort Smith named July Johnson goes to Texas with his stepson Joe to bring Jake Spoon to justice. His hapless deputy Roscoe Brown goes after them once his boss's wife Elmira Boot Johnson promptly vanishes, headed for Nebraska with buffalo hunters to find her first husband.
The whiskey boat stank, and the men on it stank, but Elmira was not sorry she had taken the passage. She had a tiny little cubbyhole among the whiskey casks, with a few planks and some buffalo skins thrown over it to keep the rain out, but she spent most of her time sitting at the rear of the boat, watching the endless flow of brown water. Some days were so hot that the air above the water shimmered and the shore become indistinct; others days a chill rain blew and she wrapped herself in one of the buffalo robes and kept fairly dry. The rain was welcome, for it discouraged the fleas. They made her sleep uneasy, but it was a small price to pay for escaping from Fort Smith. She had lived where there were fleas before, and worse things than fleas.
McMurtry's indulgences with epic storytelling and the tendency of his minor characters to behave like idiots--their misplaced devotion leading them on foolhardy quests in pursuit of lovers who want nothing more of them--seem to go hand in hand. I could have done without the July Johnson and Elmira Boot subplots. McMurtry's banter as instigated by Gus is often amusing, sometimes profound, but there's too much of it. The overkill is balanced by the tremendous appeal of Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call, the archetypal visionary and practical man. Their company is stocked with archetypes I recognized, co-workers who were far from Texas Rangers or even cowboys but exhibited many of the same qualities as Deets, Pea or Jake Spoon.
McMurtry's facility with dialogue, character and description all brought to bear on Lonesome Dove. In addition to his terrific banter-- where men debate whether it is pigs or horses who are smarter or work through the great mysteries of women or death--I liked how devoted McMurtry was to exploring the relationship between two men. Like a marriage, Gus and Call love each other, but are getting fed up. I saw quite a bit of myself in the character of Woodrow Call, a gift for an author to pull off. As antagonists go, Blue Duck has no equal. The period detail is spare but I felt I had an extremely clear proscenium on what the Old West was like as McMurtry took me through it.
In 1972 after adapting his novel The Last Picture Show to screen, Larry McMurtry was approached by its director Peter Bogdanovich to script a western for him. The Streets of Laredo was envisioned as a deconstruction, with cowboys facing their mortality. The conceit was to cast James Stewart, John Wayne and Henry Fonda as Gus, Call and Jake Spoon but Wayne had second thoughts about razing the genre he helped build and the project stalled. Twelve years later, McMurtry bought the rights to his script treatment and developed Lonesome Dove. Its publishing success spurred an acclaimed four-part television mini-series on CBS in 1989 with Robert Duvall as Gus, Tommy Lee Jones as Call, Danny Glover as Deets, the enduring Diane Lane as Lorena and Robert Urich as Jake Spoon. ...more
Notes are private!
1
Jul 02, 2017
Jul 08, 2017
May 24, 2014
Hardcover
1846687535
9781846687532
1846687535
3.57
8,061
Jun 09, 2009
Apr 15, 2010
it was amazing
Until time travel becomes widespread, I recommend Black Water Rising, a historical mystery that marked the publishing debut of Attica Locke in 2009. N
Until time travel becomes widespread, I recommend Black Water Rising, a historical mystery that marked the publishing debut of Attica Locke in 2009. Neither the story or the dialogue enthralled me straight away, skirting so close to reality that it feels more like eyewitness news reporting than storytelling, like a Texas Monthly article from the '80s. But as the novel unfolded and the uncanny details of another place, time and experience began to unravel, I was transported somewhere else. Only time will tell whether this story will leave a lasting emotional mark on me personally, but the vision dispelled between the pages lingers.
Houston, Texas in 1981. Jay Porter is an attorney who's scraping by, with clients comping him in favors rather than paying his legal fees. Determined to do something nicer for his wife Bernie on her birthday than buying her a bathrobe, Jay arranges for a moonlit cruise on Buffalo Bayou. The brown waterway is too putrid to have ever been developed and the raggedy boat they're on can't even turn around in it. Just as Bernie, pregnant with the couple's first child, begins to appreciate Jay's thought, they hear two gunshots and a woman's scream. When a white woman crashes through the brush and sinks into the murk, Jay rescues her.
Unable or unwilling to speak, the woman unnerves Jay by the danger she poses to him should she start involving him in whatever business she's mixed up in. He drops her off at the police station and ignores Bernie's pleas that he go in to make a statement. Monday, he's in civil court, seeking damages on behalf of his client, an escort who was injured when her date--a port commissioner and former city councilman--crashed them into a telephone pole. Jay's opponent is Charlie Luckman, a defense attorney who came close to being elected D.A. and knows every power broker in Houston. Charlie calls Jay's bluff and refuses to settle for a jackpot he knows Jay needs.
It didn't start out this way. One of his first cases out of law school was a police brutality lawsuit against the city. A rookie cop had allegedly roughed up a sixteen-year-old black kid who was nervous and fumbling for his license. Jay took the case pro bono, going head to head with the city attorney, a white man who had at least a decade of litigation experience over Jay. But Jay had, in so many ways, been preparing for that trial his whole life. His own legal troubles were not so far behind his mind. He remembered what it was like to sit at a defense table, remembered what it felt like to have his basic civil liberties up for debate. The anger was still with him then. And he let it guide him the whole way. He went after the cop with a vengeance, making the poor man stand in for everything that was wrong with a country and a government that applied the law willy-nilly. By closing arguments, half the jury was nodding along to his every other word and Jay won the case.
Jay is summoned by his father-in-law, the Reverend Boykins. Tension at the Port of Houston between the white International Longshoreman's Association and the black Brotherhood of Longshoremen over whether to strike for equality has resulted in a teenaged union brother being beaten by three white men. Fanning the flames is Kwame Mackalvy, a community activist and schoolmate of Jay's from the University of Houston in the early '70s who envisions a lawsuit. The reverend hopes that Jay can get the black union police protection by reaching out to another name from his school days: Cynthia Maddox, the mayor of Houston and first woman to hold the office. Jay remains dubious.
In the Chronicle, Jay reads about a white male shot twice in the 400 block of Clinton, in Fifth Ward, not far from the bayou. No name, but mention is made of a female acquaintance questioned. Jay stumbles around the crime scene and confirms that it's the spot on the bayou where the white woman fell in. Spotted by a groundskeeper, Jay grows paranoid over the trail he might have left for the authorities, or whoever. In college, he was an organizer for SNCC and was tried for inciting a riot and conspiracy to commit murder of a federal informant. Jay's then girlfriend, who he met when she started showing up to SNCC meetings, promptly disappeared after his arrest. Her name was Cynthia Maddox.
Jay is busy trying to track down a witness in his hooker/ port commissioner car crash and put food on the table. When the home of a black longshoreman is shot up, his father-in-law again pleads for Jay to speak to the mayor about getting police protection for the Brotherhood. Jay is preoccupied that the boat pilot on the night of the bayou incident might have mentioned his name or his wife's to the police. He discovers that the pilot died of a cardiac arrest after driving his car into a ditch. Jay begins to notice the same black Ford LTD in his rearview mirror and ponders a connection. Meanwhile, he agrees to deliver a message to his ex-lover in City Hall.
He doesn't remember when he stopped loving her, or when exactly he started. They never called it anything or gave it a name. In the beginning she was just a scruffy kid who started coming around to meetings. He was the one who had been appointed to tell her, as forcefully as need be, to stop. They didn't want her help. Her political awakening was on her own time, not theirs. Besides, in those days, the sisters were still frying chicken and going on beer runs for the meetings, walking ten feet behind the men at campus marches. If the brothers hadn't run her off, the sisters surely would have. No way a white girl was gon' get in line first.
Black Water Rising is a debut novel in name only. Attica Locke, a native Houstonian, spent twelve plus years working as a heavily in demand screenwriter with one credit--an episode of CBS' Early Edition starring Kyle Chandler in 1999--to show for it. It's hard not to feel the influence of one of the greatest original screenplays ever written, Chinatown by Robert Towne, on her novel, which instead of water and real estate for its mystery draws on the assets of the Bayou City: oil and port labor. There's something of a doomed romance between Jay and Cynthia that isn't quite cinematic, but did strike me as deep, complicated and believable.
Detective story flourishes are all over the book, from crooked officers to power brokers to hookers to Jay's ace in the hole, a bar owner and former client named Rolly Snow who fancies himself a private dick and can find almost anyone. What sets Black Water Rising apart is the beast of racial injustice. Jay is filled with antipathy over outliving his father, who was beaten to death in their small East Texas town of Nigton while Jay was still in the womb, over being followed, wiretapped and set up by the government and over his predisposition for keeping his mouth shut. Philip Marlowe thought he had a rough go.
Disclaimer: My ardor for this novel has much to do with growing up in Houston at the same time as the author. Her use of Buffalo Bayou as a plot catalyst, of Houston's first female mayor Kathy Whitmire as source material and Gilley's as a location where Jay is not warmly welcomed were all a delight to explore. Buildings, neighborhoods and radio are described in a way that made them seem more real to me than those of my memory, and introduces much in the way of what the city was like in the turbulent early '70s that I did not know. The novel does pack a lot of detail with little titillation, but kept me involved and eager to read the author's followup. ...more
Houston, Texas in 1981. Jay Porter is an attorney who's scraping by, with clients comping him in favors rather than paying his legal fees. Determined to do something nicer for his wife Bernie on her birthday than buying her a bathrobe, Jay arranges for a moonlit cruise on Buffalo Bayou. The brown waterway is too putrid to have ever been developed and the raggedy boat they're on can't even turn around in it. Just as Bernie, pregnant with the couple's first child, begins to appreciate Jay's thought, they hear two gunshots and a woman's scream. When a white woman crashes through the brush and sinks into the murk, Jay rescues her.
Unable or unwilling to speak, the woman unnerves Jay by the danger she poses to him should she start involving him in whatever business she's mixed up in. He drops her off at the police station and ignores Bernie's pleas that he go in to make a statement. Monday, he's in civil court, seeking damages on behalf of his client, an escort who was injured when her date--a port commissioner and former city councilman--crashed them into a telephone pole. Jay's opponent is Charlie Luckman, a defense attorney who came close to being elected D.A. and knows every power broker in Houston. Charlie calls Jay's bluff and refuses to settle for a jackpot he knows Jay needs.
It didn't start out this way. One of his first cases out of law school was a police brutality lawsuit against the city. A rookie cop had allegedly roughed up a sixteen-year-old black kid who was nervous and fumbling for his license. Jay took the case pro bono, going head to head with the city attorney, a white man who had at least a decade of litigation experience over Jay. But Jay had, in so many ways, been preparing for that trial his whole life. His own legal troubles were not so far behind his mind. He remembered what it was like to sit at a defense table, remembered what it felt like to have his basic civil liberties up for debate. The anger was still with him then. And he let it guide him the whole way. He went after the cop with a vengeance, making the poor man stand in for everything that was wrong with a country and a government that applied the law willy-nilly. By closing arguments, half the jury was nodding along to his every other word and Jay won the case.
Jay is summoned by his father-in-law, the Reverend Boykins. Tension at the Port of Houston between the white International Longshoreman's Association and the black Brotherhood of Longshoremen over whether to strike for equality has resulted in a teenaged union brother being beaten by three white men. Fanning the flames is Kwame Mackalvy, a community activist and schoolmate of Jay's from the University of Houston in the early '70s who envisions a lawsuit. The reverend hopes that Jay can get the black union police protection by reaching out to another name from his school days: Cynthia Maddox, the mayor of Houston and first woman to hold the office. Jay remains dubious.
In the Chronicle, Jay reads about a white male shot twice in the 400 block of Clinton, in Fifth Ward, not far from the bayou. No name, but mention is made of a female acquaintance questioned. Jay stumbles around the crime scene and confirms that it's the spot on the bayou where the white woman fell in. Spotted by a groundskeeper, Jay grows paranoid over the trail he might have left for the authorities, or whoever. In college, he was an organizer for SNCC and was tried for inciting a riot and conspiracy to commit murder of a federal informant. Jay's then girlfriend, who he met when she started showing up to SNCC meetings, promptly disappeared after his arrest. Her name was Cynthia Maddox.
Jay is busy trying to track down a witness in his hooker/ port commissioner car crash and put food on the table. When the home of a black longshoreman is shot up, his father-in-law again pleads for Jay to speak to the mayor about getting police protection for the Brotherhood. Jay is preoccupied that the boat pilot on the night of the bayou incident might have mentioned his name or his wife's to the police. He discovers that the pilot died of a cardiac arrest after driving his car into a ditch. Jay begins to notice the same black Ford LTD in his rearview mirror and ponders a connection. Meanwhile, he agrees to deliver a message to his ex-lover in City Hall.
He doesn't remember when he stopped loving her, or when exactly he started. They never called it anything or gave it a name. In the beginning she was just a scruffy kid who started coming around to meetings. He was the one who had been appointed to tell her, as forcefully as need be, to stop. They didn't want her help. Her political awakening was on her own time, not theirs. Besides, in those days, the sisters were still frying chicken and going on beer runs for the meetings, walking ten feet behind the men at campus marches. If the brothers hadn't run her off, the sisters surely would have. No way a white girl was gon' get in line first.
Black Water Rising is a debut novel in name only. Attica Locke, a native Houstonian, spent twelve plus years working as a heavily in demand screenwriter with one credit--an episode of CBS' Early Edition starring Kyle Chandler in 1999--to show for it. It's hard not to feel the influence of one of the greatest original screenplays ever written, Chinatown by Robert Towne, on her novel, which instead of water and real estate for its mystery draws on the assets of the Bayou City: oil and port labor. There's something of a doomed romance between Jay and Cynthia that isn't quite cinematic, but did strike me as deep, complicated and believable.
Detective story flourishes are all over the book, from crooked officers to power brokers to hookers to Jay's ace in the hole, a bar owner and former client named Rolly Snow who fancies himself a private dick and can find almost anyone. What sets Black Water Rising apart is the beast of racial injustice. Jay is filled with antipathy over outliving his father, who was beaten to death in their small East Texas town of Nigton while Jay was still in the womb, over being followed, wiretapped and set up by the government and over his predisposition for keeping his mouth shut. Philip Marlowe thought he had a rough go.
Disclaimer: My ardor for this novel has much to do with growing up in Houston at the same time as the author. Her use of Buffalo Bayou as a plot catalyst, of Houston's first female mayor Kathy Whitmire as source material and Gilley's as a location where Jay is not warmly welcomed were all a delight to explore. Buildings, neighborhoods and radio are described in a way that made them seem more real to me than those of my memory, and introduces much in the way of what the city was like in the turbulent early '70s that I did not know. The novel does pack a lot of detail with little titillation, but kept me involved and eager to read the author's followup. ...more
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