Larry McMurty - Considered

 I have read one Larry McMurty novel - Lonesome Dove. I thought it brilliant, a sort of absurdist western epic. Not as overtly strange as Blood Meridian, but one that hides its strangeness in a more straightforward story and style.

Reading Lawrence Wright on Larry McMurtry makes me think I was right about admiring McMurty:

Larry puzzled over the life he chose. He quoted Walter Benjamin on the difference between a novelist and a storyteller. He thought about the stories of the frontier he heard his relatives tell on the porch in his bookless childhood, and he wondered “how someone like myself, growing up in a place that had just been settled, and a place, moreover, in which nothing of cultural or historical consequence had ever happened, became a novelist instead of being content to worry over an old woman who had been traded for skunk hides, or a dairy farmer who has given way to despair. Does mere human memory, the soil that nourishes storytelling, still have any use at all?” And yet he made a career of writing about people who, like himself, were intellectually starved and imprisoned by the life they were born into. The slapdash quality of some of his work was frustrating for his fans—for me, at least. But he still managed to create some of the most memorable figures in Texas literature.

He was a penetrating and learned critic, and no doubt he turned that critical eye on himself too harshly. That self-mocking sweatshirt he wore when he was a young writer, defiantly emblazoned with MINOR REGIONAL NOVELIST, showed that he saw himself as a part of the same Texas writers’ scene that he scorned. He held himself to the same high standards that he insisted we shoot for. He was riding herd on Texas writers, driving us all to exceed our narrow ambitions, while feeling that he himself fell short of the mark. He even described his greatest achievement, Lonesome Dove, as “no masterpiece.”

And yet, it is.

I suggest for anyone reading this to think – as I have – we need to exceed our narrow ambitions.

Also, a note on The Millions having updated its website.

sch 9/14

Updated 9/18.

Art Imitates Life: On the Making of Larry McMurtry, The Writer Tracy Daugherty on the Chronicler of the American West

sch