Thalia

July 1, 2017
Omnibus collection containing the esteemed Texas author's first three novels, a loose cycle about the people who live hardscrabble lives on the austere, windswept plains of the Red River country.The first volume in the present collection put McMurtry on the literary map, if, in some eyes, for the wrong reasons. Horseman, Pass By (1961) takes its title from a sharp-edged lyric by William Butler Yeats, importuning the traveler to "Cast a cold eye / On life, on death." At the dark heart of the sometimes-sensationalized story is the aimless Hud, a cowboy who knows his way around a rope and steer but hasn't been well socialized; as played by Paul Newman in the movie, he was a sneering ruffian but less sociopathic than McMurtry's original. McMurtry slyly alludes to the Yeats poem, writing that the rodeo was the biggest thing to hit the tiny, dusty town of Thalia, and "since it all came like Christmas, only once a year, I was careful not to let any of it pass me by." Leaving Cheyenne (1963), the second novel, pushes the Thalia story back in time but into familiar-for-McMurtry territory: especially in a small town where everyone knows everyone else's business, when two men fall in love with the same woman, hard feelings ensue. "I wish I knew what all was involved in this loving somebody," says a principal. "Mostly a lot of damn heartbreak, I know that." There's heartbreak aplenty for McMurtry's own agemates in The Last Picture Show (1966), a brilliant evocation of a time and place--and of the confusion that results when, for whatever intent, people start making a game of love. Jane Austen it isn't, but McMurtry has followed his characters' fortunes in a succession of sequels, including Texasville (1987) and Rhino Ranch (2009). It's good to have these essential novels in one place. One wishes only that McMurtry had provided more commentary; his introduction, lamenting "the myth of my country, and of my people, too," is frustratingly short and only hints at what he might have done.

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Starred review from September 1, 2017
Newly graduated from North Texas State College in the summer of 1958 with one creative-writing class to his credit, Larry McMurtry headed home to Archer City, Texas, to cowboy on his father's ranch, and ended up writing his first novel, Horseman, Pass By, published in 1961. Two years later, Leaving Cheyenne appeared, and, in 1966, The Last Picture Show completed McMurtry's saga about Thalia, a small, struggling, 1950s Texas town. Though the third novel still has name recognition, thanks to its double life as a 1971 Academy Awardwinning movie, all three have been overshadowed by the prolific writer's several dozen subsequent novels, including the Pulitzer Prizewinning Lonesome Dove (1985) and the Emmy-winning television miniseries it engendered. With the release of Thalia: A Texas Trilogy, readers will be able once again to fully appreciate the insight, daring, command, and magnetism of these remarkably accomplished works by a young writer grappling with profound questions about land, family, and tradition; small-town life and social divides; longing and heartbreak. Horseman, Pass By, its title lifted from W. B. Yeats, is beyond precocious in its empathy, emotional precision, lyricism, and intimate appreciation for the grandeur and peril of the wide-open range and the claustrophobia of ranch and town life. Lonnie, 17, is living with Homer, his grandfather; Homer's second wife, Jewel; and her sadistic 35-year-old son, Hud. Tension is escalating with the threat of a hoof-and-mouth-disease outbreak. While Homer faces the brutal destruction of his herd, Lonnie struggles with his attraction to their cook, Halmea, a kind and bemused African American woman who becomes the target of Hud's violent lust and perverted sense of entitlement, culminating in a rape that reveals the molten rage, resentment, and evil boiling beneath the pasture lands. By so frankly portraying Halmea and so explicitly illuminating her dire predicament, McMurtry takes on the crimes and shame of racism and sexism, incendiary themes excised from Hud, the 1963 film adaptation starring Paul Newman. Leaving Cheyenne is a longer, more complicated, and even riskier work spanning decades and told in three voices that track the hills and valleys of an until-death-do-them-part love triangle. Both Gid (for Gideon), a dutiful rancher's son, and his buddy Johnny, a devil-may-care cowboy, court lovely, poor, strong, and wildly independent Molly. Gid is determined to marry her until she shocks him to the core by rejecting his repeated proposals and offering unencumbered sex. She then abruptly marries Eddie, an oil worker as dangerous and abusive as her alcoholic father, without ending her affairs with Gid and Johnny. The three men orbiting Molly embody three temperaments and three modes of Texas life, while she is a source of perpetual wonder as McMurtry reveals the true extent of the traumas she's endured, her exceptional self-sufficiency, and the intricacies of her loving, enduring, sometimes anguished involvements with Gid and Johnny.In The Last Picture Show, Thalia is a little oasis of light in the vast night with a movie theater, pool hall, and cafe, all owned by gruff but kind Sam the Lion. He's a mentor for teens Sonny and Duane, another pair of good friends attracted to the same girl. They sleep through their classes, play sports half-heartedly, get drunk, and work hard at their jobs. Duane is determined to marry pretty, wealthy Jacy, but she is stringing him along while hanging out with other rich, spoiled teens, egged on by her sexy, catastrophically unhappy mother. After Duane leaves town in a fury, Jacy toys with Sonny, who has fallen into a tender, mutually revelatory...