Duane's Depressed - Softcover

McMurtry, Larry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0671034618 ISBN 13: 9780671034610

Publisher: Pocket, 1999

Synopsis

In this final volume of the Last Picture Show/Texasville story, McMurtry brings the Thalia saga to an end. Utterly unsentimental, often hilarious, sometimes tragic and shocking...and in the end full of hope, this is a major work by any standard.

About this title

Review

At 62, ever-dependable oil man Duane Moore ditches his pickup and starts walking everywhere--deeply deviant behavior in one-stoplight Thalia, Texas. "It occurred to him one day--not in a flash, but through a process of seepage, a kind of gas leak into his consciousness--that most of his memories, from his first courtship to the lip of old age, involved the cabs of pickups," Larry McMurtry writes. Yet oddly enough, Duane's marriage, four children and nine grandchildren, his career highs and lows, all occurred when he was nowhere near his vehicle. Within days he has moved into his cabin on a hill, reacquired his dog, Shorty the Sixth ("an air of slight guilt was typical of all the Shortys"), and begun to think on these things. Of course, this brings on an additional problem: "He realized that for the first time in his life he had too much time to think; of course he had wanted more time to think, but that was probably because he hadn't realized how tricky thinking could be."

Luckily for readers, Duane's attempts to go off the grid are far from successful. Thus do we have the deep pleasures of his comical and complex encounters with his wife, Karla, and family, not to mention some of Thalia's singular citizens. As ever, McMurtry's dialogue and narration snaps and surprises. He makes his hero's solitude, and his increasing depression, infinitely intriguing. Will Duane's attempts to literally and figuratively cultivate his garden succeed? Will he forge his way through the three volumes of Proust that his attractive new psychiatrist has prescribed in lieu of Prozac? Will the catfish that has found its way into his waterbed survive? Answers to these and many other questions await you in Duane's Depressed, the final book of the marvelous trilogy McMurtry began with The Last Picture Show and Texasville. Let us pray that it turns into a quartet: we need far more of Duane and his family. For a start, his granddaughter Barbi--"a dark midge of a child"--merits a volume of her own. --Kerry Fried

About the Author

Larry McMurtry, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is the author of twenty-five novels, three collections of essays, two memoirs, and more than thirty screenplays, and is the editor of a collection of short stories of the modern West. He lives in Archer City, Texas.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pocket
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0671034618
• ISBN 13: 9780671034610
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 432