(no subject)

[decemberthirty]

I finished The Last Picture Show. In some ways it reminded me very strongly of Lonesome Dove and Streets of Laredo, the other Larry McMurtry books that I've read, but in other ways it was quite different. All three books have a similar sense of isolation to them; all of McMurtry's characters seem to have a deep inarticulacy with regard to their emotions, and although their feelings for each other are often quite strong, their inability to express any of their inner lives to each other keeps their interactions on a strange superficial level. You know that there is all this feeling lurking somewhere under the surface, but it's never ever allowed out. Reading The Last Picture Show, I had the feeling that this inarticulacy stemmed from a profound lack of self-knowledge on the part of the characters. Unlike Gus and Woodrow Call in Lonesome Dove, who would never under any circumstances have spoken about how important they were to each other, I had the feeling that Sonny would perhaps have told Duane or Mrs. Popper how he felt about them, if he himself had had any understanding of how he felt. But nothing in his life had ever prepared him to look inside, to examine his heart, and so every time he felt an emotion he was mystified by it.

The characters' inability to process emotion is reflected in the utterly flat and affectless narrative voice. Every event in the story is related in the same steady, bare-bones language, regardless of the significance or drama of the event. It made me feel as if I were watching the story unfold from a great distance, all the characters just tiny figures being moved about by forces beyond their ken. It gave the book a real sense of tragedy and weight.

All in all, I thought it was a very good book. Not as great or as moving as Lonesome Dove, perhaps, but that's a bit like how I keep saying that none of Pat Barker's books are as great as Regeneration. I was impressed by the way McMurtry used an accumulation of subtle detail to make me feel as intimately acquainted with the world of the book as the characters who had been living there all their lives. And as much as I loved Sonny and Duane and Jacy, many of the peripheral characters were really fabulous and added a lot of life to the story: Genevieve, Jacy's mother (man, the lines she got to deliver!), of course Sam the Lion...

And now I've started reading October Light by John Gardner. My dad picked it up at some used book sale a while ago and gave it to me. I hardly know a thing about it, but it's been sitting on the shelf for a while so now it's getting read. I haven't gotten far enough to form any kind of opinion yet, but the opening scene is of a very very disgruntled old man blowing up a television with a shotgun. At the very least, it's an attention getting way to start a book.

Also, I would just like to state for the record that intend to finish my current chapter of the book this evening.