The Last Picture Show Book New York Times Review

Dec 3, 1966

Books of The Times

By THOMAS LASK

THE Last Film SHOW By Larry McMurtry.

othing much happens in Larry McMurtry's tertiary novel, "The Last Picture Show." But and so nothing much happens in Thalia, the small-scale Western town he is writing nearly. A sorrier place would be difficult to find. It is desiccated and shabby physically, hateful and small-minded spiritually. Mr. McMurtry is expert in anatomizing its suffocating and expressionless-end character. Although the boondocks faces the open up prairie, it has no horizons and is as joyless as a 24-hr movie house at 10 in the morn. Information technology is a place in which a homo can live all his life and stop up feeling anonymous. When the football team finally wins the district championship, the boondocks goes wild with exaggerated joy. But Sonny Crawford, nevertheless a boy who once played on the squad, cannot work himself into the mood of the crowd and finds himself in the middle of the hysterical mob equally isolated and solitary as if he were in jail.

Thalia behaves like a geological phenomenon. As before long as a crack appears or something untoward occurs that offends information technology, it moves inexorably to eradicate it. With aught to do and nothing to stimulate the listen, sex activity becomes the common pursuit and the townspeople, youngsters and adults, act out their frustrations, their compulsions, their boredom and their hates in physical couplings. These are more bestial than exalted or joyous. Mr. McMurtry can make them funny and brutal at the aforementioned time. Just even when he is near explicit, his book has an understanding compassion that focuses the reader'southward listen on the hollowness of these erotic encounters rather than on the sexual details. Equally in final flavour's "Jolly," by J. Weston, there is an essential innocence almost the immature people, no matter how depraved they talk or sometimes act. But when they cannot escape from their surround, they become the frustrated, defeated and baffled figures we think from Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio."

Sonny Crawford and his best friend, Duane, are two amongst them. Both work and get to school, but the school is a farce. Information technology goes through the motions academically, simply enough to comply with whatever laws at that place are. The boys play ball part of the day and sleep through their studies the rest of the time. The big homo at the school is the football autobus, a coarse, stupid, Neanderthal type who doubles as a teacher in civics, a course he couldn't pass, never mind teach. But the coach knows how to protect his preserve. When another teacher wants to turn his prize quarterback to serious study, the coach contrives to go him dismissed for perversion.

Duane's problem is that he is in love with Jacy Farrow, the daughter of the richest people in town and he is afraid that her parents are against his marriage. They are, but the one who is really against it is Jacy. For Jacy is a tease. Pretty and wealthy, she uses both attributes to become what she wants. Of a dramatic cast of heed, she likes to retrieve of herself in dramatic situations and she goes almost making every bit many lives as unhappy every bit she can. Sonny is likewise in love with Jacy, but until his turn comes, he is caught up with the wife of the coach, in whom boredom is matched only by despair.

In that location are one or two clear-eyed people in the book: Jacy'due south mother, for one, who sees through the hypocrisies and gospel-mouthings of the townsfolk. She is independent and wealthy enough to do every bit she pleases. Only it is interesting that even she can discover no outlets other than the usual ones. The deviation is that she doesn't much care what anyone thinks. In that location is the possessor of the local pool parlor, who has seen it all but who is too sometime at present to practise much about it. There is 1 perfectly adjusted graphic symbol in the identify: Abilene. His passion is pool. He works in the oil fields all twenty-four hours and handles a cue all dark, except when he is squiring some filly around in his Mercury. Thalia is sky if you like pool.

Mr. McMurtry is not exactly a virtuoso at the typewriter. Some of the transitions equally he works from ane scene to the next are noticeable; some of the writing could be smoother. Just he knows his town and its folkways. He is, surprisingly, more successful with his women. The boys tend to be composites. In that location is not that much departure between Sonny and Duane and Joe Bob. But Jacy and her mother, or the lumpy Charlene, Ruth, the coach'due south wife, even the two-bit call-girl are individuals. Thalia is pretty hateful, but you lot are likely to remember it.

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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/12/07/home/mcmurtry-show.html?scp=2&sq=the%20last%20picture%20show&st=cse

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