Directly following the chronology in “Duane’s Depressed,” this short novel is the Thalia series’ statement book on intimacy. Events are centered on protagonist Duane Moore and extend to all the other characters. By book’s end we know how most of them get along with their mates. The dusty town of Thalia, a place where bed-hopping has long been an accepted sport, is facing obsolescence, as are the sex lives of the aging cast.

The story is slow to launch, like Duane’s middle leg. By the late chapters he is taking the magic blue V pills.The reader wonders why he didn’t think about them earlier.

No matter the storyline, it’s McMurtry on display once again, and he delivers with seamless narrative and superb characterization. We are welcomed and drawn in. Some readers may be repelled by the explicit sex and language.  I think McMurtry’s blue prose is under control: vivid and sensory but not sensational or fantasy-driven in a cheapened way.

Sixty-ish oilman and amateur Thoreau Duane Moore is still in love with his psychiatrist. Dr. Honor Carmichael is a fiftyish lesbian who despite her frosty front seems to be more than clinically interested in him. The book is engaging enough (and short with a building sharp pace, as in novella length) to push the reader ahead quickly, providing a few unexpected twists in how that situation between doc and patient works out. That’s the by far best part of the novel.

Unfortunately the story loses this interesting dynamic when Honor vanishes again and McMurtry brings young oil surveyor Anne into the action. Annie is a precocious and improbable Texas brat who is, as they say, all hat and no cattle – she’s sexually hung-up and can’t back up her flirty ways.  Nevertheless our hero gets entangled with her, and (even if the author wishes us to feel otherwise) their encounters are insipid and sad. Anne is no Karla and definitely no Honor. They don’t seem to go together. We are left with a dumbed-down Duane & Annie romance that seems to exist by default.

The town of Thalia is fading fast and has no purpose, giving way to a cluster of WalMarts and Targets. Its local fixture convenience store and Dairy Queen are now run by Sri Lankans. Duane sells his house, abandons his cabin, and relocates to Arizona with Annie. Their relationship continues apparently on the mythical premise of “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.”

Which leads to his long-postponed coronary bypass surgery. Duane sits on the veranda and looks out on the desert landscape to ponder what may be next in his life. We’ll find out in the next book, “Rhino Ranch.”

In the original Thalia trilogy sequence, this is novel 3, released after “Texasville” and “The Last Picture Show.”

This is the story of Duane Moore at 60-something and how he steps away from his traditional life, en route to self-discovery and potentially a nervous breakdown as well.  It’s a quest and at the same time an abandonment. It’s a rarity in popular fiction books these days: a thorough examination of how an aging male tends to think, change, shed, yearn. The novel has aspects similar to Updike’s later-years “Rabbit,” but the angst and manners are Southern.

Despite occasional scenes of tedium and redundancy, the narrative is enjoyable and well presented. McMurtry’s perceptions and humor are always cooking underneath. In novel series mode, there are a lot of accumulative characterizations and brief summaries of history.  It’s all concise and good  – we are kept in the loop with longtime Thalia cast members Bobby Lee, Jacy, Sonny, Ruth, and Lester.

When McMurtry brings what is pertinent  to the foreground, it is all the more amplified by the generous existence in his narrative of what is not pertinent. This is a key element in his writing style.

Duane looks for some way to see the world other than from the cab of a pickup truck and becomes a dedicated walker and bicyclist. In between he experiences the difficulties of  busting loose, the joys and challenges of solitude, new ways to regard the world, and so on. By book’s end he has lost his wife, given away his dog, built a garden, and fallen in love with a lesbian psychologist. Eventually he is broken down emotionally and collapses. He hastily regroups and in his last act of escape, he hurriedly enlists a travel agent and flies away to exotic places abroad.

McMurtry is never better. Actions are emblematic and open to interpretation. In the novel’s final chapters, he weaves in elements of his own experience with reading Proust (the author read the volumes during recovery from heart surgery). Duane’s psychologist, a sophisticated woman named Honor, asks him by way of a prescription to read the Vintage three- volume set (about 3,000 pages)  of “In Search of Lost Times.” Duane, who is a simple yet smarter-than-most Texas dude, works his way through it over a year’s time. Honor invites him to a book discussion, and McMurtry creates an electrifying chapter where surprises abound. In his subsequent next-day session at Honor’s office, the book’s climax takes place.

We see some familiar touches here: the divorced aging male, his loyal friends and still-attached relatives, his exotic lovers, and an exurbian condo setting replete with nearby secret forts, i.e., the Velodrome and its tiny Airstream trailer section, reminiscent of the getaway airplane cabin wreckage in the woods in his novel Tracer.

It’s a cozy read, never strident and true to the world we live in. Well, maybe the plot and its neighbors falling like flies is a stretch, but that doesn’t matter. At the core, it’s a novel about community and one man’s place smack dab in the middle of one. That sounding board being Wallace Webster, who works for an ad firm and prefers the simple life where one draws wider focus from a narrower view. Wallace seems a level-headed dude with lots of sexual prowess. The other guys in the neighborhood are flawed and bumbling men, several of whom die. Ok, so Wallace is the community’s fiftyish years-old chick magnet.

We get interesting characters. A girlfriend (Jilly) who cracks lines like a female Morey Amsterdam;  a couple of spooky female survivor types from Jerry Springer land (Chantal and her daughter); some nosy HOA type people, a fluffy-brained police investigator with a cozy name (as in “Detective Darling”), and so on. There is an air of female veneration.

Included are lots of everyday trifling details that draw our interest, like the guilty pleasure of late-night Saltines and butter. Barthelme does not shy away from today’s world of iPads and Facebook (in a direct hit on modern American behavior, Wallace says when a question comes up, “I can Google it. Right now.”). He includes tech culture and its niggling devices and sites, alluding to their complications and influences in our life but not to the point of admitting dominance. It’s good to see, and as many writers know, not that easy to do (it’s easier for many writers to move back the clock).

The dialog features a boundless supply of erudite cleverness coming from the mouths of all the major players, despite their unpretentious existence (with meals at Wendy’s and the Olive Garden). The community described is out in the bleak coastal plain community of Kemah, sort of rural east Houston (if I recall, there was a beer joint in that area back in the 80s called Maribelle’s which Velodrome somehow dredged from my memory). It must be exhausting for Wallace and his lady friends to constantly address every little aspect of life in such cute terms. The go-for-a-quick-ha-ha aspect of some of the dialog can ring false sometimes.

Then there are those longer discussions, the All About Me background ones, in which a character talks about himself in interview fashion while the avid listener adds prompts and queries and then responds like a chorus with affirmations and touchés. Barthelme has also drawn some from his personal and family past in portraying Wallace as son of an architect and as someone who was involved in painting. In one section I had the sensation of reading the author’s memoir notes.

Webster has a tendency to tell people everything. He’s about involvement and even confession rather than detachment and reticence.  That’s good for making fiction.

This is my update from February.

“Total Solar” appeared in the New Yorker earlier this year, inspiring me to mark the calendar for the release of the first published collection of Luke Mogelson’s stories.

I ordered it but didn’t read right away. This summer I’ve stubbornly stuck to short fiction’s best of breed, the tried and true Hemingway’s Finca Vigia Collection. Then I took a break and stepped back briefly into modern writers’ time. I’m glad, for it’s quality stuff.

I figured I would fly through Mogelson’s book but his stories have a richness and layering of intent that makes a reader slow down, even go back and re-read, which in my view is a sign of a  well-done short story: one that asks to be re-examined.

Mogelson is not hesitant to deliver narrative in strings of expository sentences rather than scene. He can do both, and he can cut the fat and expose the iceberg with the best of them.

Were they all war stories? No, not completely. Two vivid accounts from the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq are “Kids” and “Total Solar.” The latter is exemplary in construction. Other stories involve veterans struggling to find their way with physical disabilities or mental disorders. I got the impression that perhaps the author was at times channeling Hemingway’s “A Soldier Home” which doesn’t describe war at all but instead focuses on its personal aftermath. These are not cheerful stories.

“The Port is Near” was gloomy too but had some humor, and we half-expected to see a happier ending to this one. The protagonist’s only direct allusion to service is a 9-11 reference describing when he lived in San Francisco “before they attacked us and I volunteered.” The rest is about his post-tour job aboard a net-fishing boat with a psycho captain (jobs for vets are hard to come by, that implies). Mogelson delivers an engrossing sea adventure scaled to short story size. Being on the fishing boat is in itself  a battle of sorts and one that also ends with madness and loss.

The symbolic clouds are puffy white and filled with promise as the story opens in a tropical paradise where independent detective Hector, now with a limp and minus an eye, is recharging after his wounds suffered in “No Easy Thing.” His retreat is cut short, and he re-enters a crime world far beyond his ability. By the end of this book, the clouds are dark and foreboding over the evil in Mexico City — Hector will describe them as “clouds of shit.”

In a masterful and imaginative mood, Taibo writes himself into this book as a writer. The character is named Paco Ignacio. The chapter in which Hector and Paco meet is like an interview between the author and his protagonist. Ignacio later plays a surprisingly important role in the story and becomes a deux ex machina figure.

Hector’s sister Elisa reappears from the previous book and talks Hector into looking into a friend’s murder case. She later regrets that she led her brother into such danger. We get the feeling at the end (it is only about 130 pages, perfect for a Hector novel) that our hero is not out of the woods. He won’t flee the country and hide however. He will remain in Mexico and face even more trouble in the next novel, “No Happy Ending.”

Each of Taibo’s Hector Belascoaran novels can stand on its own. Yet without reading them collectively and in sequence, the reader may be unaware of Hector’s past, and thereby miss some nuances. They’re also likely to miss how the next book picks up a thread or mood and continues it.

(originally posted August 10, 2012 and updated April 29, 2016) – The movie version is out, a sleek ninety-minutes featuring Tom Hanks and some stunning photography from the fictional and troubled megaplex being built by the Red Sea, and from a homogenized Jeddah hotel (where the concierge repeatedly recites “Welcome to the Hyatt”in an Arab accent). There is a scene with some great footage shot in Mecca, where Alan Clay (Hanks) nervously hides in the car as a non-Moslem.

It’s an important movie, a tale of love and redemption that informs us about international relations, specifically with the Arab world. In these times perhaps some will find it increases understanding and peels away blind hate.

It’s also a take on how it can be sometimes to work in IT. You get sent on a boondoggle, the conditions suck, the network is down, you’re hungry, and no one pays attention to you unless you complain enough or do something outside the rules (like Alan sneaking upstairs without a badge).

In the novel, Eggers’ writing style is clean and direct, similar to the clipped style he used in “Zeitoun.” The book’s print job has illogical spacing. In some instances a gap is put between sentences obviously belonging to the same paragraph. Without the random spacing, and with some merciful reduction of a few scenes here and there, this thing could be close to novella land.

The story moves well, conventionally, and slows down in the middle. It is loaded with humor: the character Yousef is an instant hit, Westernized and corrupted by two cultures. The novel gives a rare look inside the unknown world of the UAE.  It’s a dual world, orderly on the surface, yet disordered on the underside. The work ethic is amorphous. Imports do much of it (“We don’t have unions. We have Fillpinos”). The orgiastic scene at the Danish embassy pretty well sums up the conflicting “moral guidelines” of compound residents vs. citizens.

The protagonist (Alan Clay) suffers a frustrating impasse inside the King’s new business complex, as he and his IT team wait for a chance to make their big pitch to sell the Arabs a holographic teleconferencing product. Meanwhile they’re stuck in a tent, largely ignored, without food and without wi-fi.  During this seemingly endless delay, Alan begins to fall apart. We are privy to flashback after flashback of guilt, shame, and failure.

He’s not a happy guy. And neither are we, suffering along with him. Along the way, we are reminded of the disembowelment of our economy by handing over all our work to cheap labor outside the country. There is a strong section about PPG Glass losing the new Freedom Tower contract to China, who manages to get the work Alan and his crew were after, too. Eggers manages to fit this into the story without making it shout editorial interruption.

Alan’s history of failure with the dying American bike company, Schwinn, is put in contrast to his new dreams as an IT salesman who helps wire the New Arabia. So we have mechanical vs. electronic, the tangible vs. ethereal.

Alan can’t seem to do much right. Two seductive ladies fall for him (we don’t know why), and he can’t handle that either. Can’t perform. One of them is a doctor who surgically excavates the cyst on his spine. Little goes right for them. As she eventually says, “it’s all very sad.”

At the end where we are dropped off, it appears as if finagling a job with the King’s “start-up” business will be his last chance saloon. His last chance to build something to save himself. He’s a man without a country. With a hole in his back.

The movie, however, has things end on a happier note.

Larry McMurtry presents a mixed bag of topics here, essays and personal accounts related to his love of books and writing. He uses a cowboy metaphor, stating his life-work is to corral and tame words and drive them forward to a conclusion. Books are his wide open range where he has spent a lifetime roaming.

He is certainly qualified to talk cowboy, having been one in his youth when he grew up on a ranch in the northern plains of Texas, in Archer City. It’s a real place and also a fictionalized place where movies were shot based on his novels, like “The Last Picture Show” and “Texasville.”

Of more academic substance, McMurtry gives a compelling history of the Texas plains where his family settled and ranched in pioneer days and beyond. It’s also a world he wanted to escape from, going off to urban centers where the supply of books is as abundant as thinking and diversity. So he forsook his father in following a life as rancher and chose to be a bookworm and a novelist. Eventually he came back and settled.

McMurtry validates his subtitle “reflections at sixty and beyond.” He at times is crotchety and nostalgic over times and customs long since lost. It’s a good read, more complex than it first appears. Some patience is required when he wanders off on side roads. One of the better side roads is his account of heart surgery – how surgery and deep anesthesia can change a person. I know several people, including myself, who will vouch for this….something is lost in that suspended time, and its recovery is doubtful. Larry McMurtry fought back to regain his abilities after surgery when he was unable to read. His eventual long dive into the works of Proust and Woolfe reinvigorated the writer in him, a thankful turn for him and all of us who love his writing.

(The book is entertaining. You can read it like Tolstoy – in parts. A brief update to previous post)

McMurtry’s writing in this one is often like rodeo-talk mixed with the campy voice of “Dodge Ram tough.” Events can sometimes be trifling and sometimes sublime. When the author shifts to events of more substance the writing comes forward with an accomplished ease.

The book’s ending soars above the rest. The Montana chapters and Woodrow Call’s return-to-Texas chapters have their own tone and relentless pace. The writing is clear and unobtrusive and therefore perfect for the action.

McMurtry’s general readership may not know his creative writing credentials. He took his  degree in Texas then joined a highly talented class of writers at Stanford University back in the Sixties, including Robert Stone and Ken Kesey. Frank O’Connor was one of his teachers.

McMurtry gives us honest prose using the omniscient voice of a skilled novelist. There is no short-changing, plenty of patience. In such a lengthy book, enormous writing energy is required to create scene after scene, weaving the motives and desires of characters, making them vivid, and placing them in an action-packed milieu that we can see and experience. Larry McMurty is a treasure in American fiction.