Larry McMurtry and the Victorian Novel by Roger Jones, and: Larry McMurtry and the West: An Ambivalent Relationship by Mark Busby

Abstract

EssayReview Larry McMurtry and the Victorian Novel By Roger Jones. (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1994. 112 pages, $19.50.) Larry McMurtry and the West:An AmbivalentRelationship. By Mark Busby. (Denton: Univer­ sity of North Texas Press, 1995. 344 pages, $19.95.) Henry IV supposedly once declared to his ministers that Paris was indeed “worth a Mass.” That declaration often came to my mind as I began reviewing two new critical works on Texas’s most celebrated novelist and favorite son of letters. I found myself wondering throughout the process, “Is Larry McMurtry worth a book?” The answer for several hundred critics is that he most certainly is. To date, no fewer than four (one of them my own) book-length critical studies of the “novelist from Archer City”have appeared. Each approaches McMurtry’s work warily and somewhat systemati­ cally. Each seems to be searching for a discovery that will cement this man who once wore a tee-shirt that read “Minor Regional Novelist”into the tradition ofAmerican literature, or at least of western American literature. It’s not an easy fit. McMurtry’s "canon,”if one may use the term, is “as disorganized as the weather,” to borrow a phrase from Mark Twain, and it’s less consistent. Assessing his entire body of work is made more complex by a series of self-assessing artistic pronouncements from the novelist himself, each seeming to contradict the others over a period of nearly thirty years of quasi-notoriety and off-the-cuff speaking engagements. The “quasi” part of that statement rests on my notion that McMurtry, while well known to readers in Texas and the Southwest, does not enjoy quite the national reputa­ tion regional critics, “minor” or otherwise, might imagine. I recall giving a lecture to a colloquy at a major midwestern university only a fewyears ago. I evoked McMurtry’sname several times during my discussion of the “Contemporary Novel of the American West.” Afterwards, no fewer than a dozen people asked me who, precisely, this “McMurtry fellow”was; at least three of them thought I had misspoken and was referring to Cormac McCarthy. In another instance, a reviewer of Taking Stock: A Larry McMurtry Casebookcalled me to complain that she wished “all these college professors”would leave McMurtry alone until he had written something besides one novel (LonesomeDove).And more recently, I found myself in contentious argument with a bookstore owner over the size of McMurtry’s publication list. He insisted that the Texas author had but five books to his credit; when I opened a flyleaf of Pretty BoyFloyd and demonstrated a list that was more than two-thirds longer, he asserted, “But those are all regional novels. They don’t count.” Regardless of McMurtry’s popular reputation, a great deal of critical ink has been spilled in an attempt to analyze his works (regional and otherwise) in literary-critical terms. From article to delivered paper, critics young and old appear to want desperately 64 WesternAmerican Literature to make him “fit” into some kind of traditional context other than that of the slightly-above-average contemporary-mainstream “minor regional novelist.” My argument with the bookseller aside, it is generally accepted that McMurtry’s artistic literary reputation, such as it is, truly rests on four distinctworks: Horseman, PassBy (1961), TheLastPictureShow (1966), the Pulitzer-Prize winning LonesomeDove (1985), and a curious essay published in the Texas Observer, “Ever a Bridegroom: Reflections on the Failure of Texas Literature” (23 October 1981). The other nineteen books (including two books ofessays) fuel the continuing debate among literary critics over the question of whether McMurtry is a bona fide literary genius on the order of William Faulkner, or whether he’s merely a long-burning “flash in the pan,” and perhaps the only decent native Texan writer Texas has to offer. The Texas Observeressay, which has excited continual controversy since its publica­ tion, is a castigation ofTexas writers (J. Frank Dobie etal.) who devote themselves entirely to the myths of Texas’s legendary past and find their stories and themes in the artificial archetypes of manufactured history. McMurtry carps that contemporary writers need to be aware that Texas is no longer part of some...