In this book some teenage boys have sex with a blind cow. And this is not even the climactic center of the book. Apparently this is just part of normal small town life in Texas. The author is famous for his novels that draw on his own upbringing in small town Texas, so I guess this is based on true events. This just goes to show you what I have always thought, which is that small towns are not charming as people try to claim, but in fact dangerous and creepy. (See also scarring movie WICKERMAN, but only if you want to be scarred.)
“We could go on down to the stockpens,” Leroy suggested. “There’s a blind heifer down there we could fuck.” . . . . The prospect of copulation with a blind heifer excited the younger boys almost to frenzy, but Duane and Sonny, being seniors, gave only tacit approval. They regarded such goings on without distaste, but were no longer as rabid about animals as they had been. . . In the course of their adolescence both boys had frequently had recourse to bovine outlets. At that they were considered overfastidious by the farm youth of the area, who thought only dandies restricted themselves to cows and heifers. The farm kids did it with cows, mares, sheep, dogs, and whatever else they could catch . . . It was common knowledge that the reason boys from the diary farming communities were so reluctant to come out for football was because it put them home too late for the milking and caused them to miss regular connection with the milk cows.
IS HE JOKING. At least in the play EQUUS this kind of thing is given the dignity of being a major plot point. Here it’s not. This story is about this young man, Sonny, who is graduating high school. He is having an affair with a middle-aged woman who is in a marriage people casually assume is abusive. (Sample: “I don’t understand how Mrs Popper’s lasted,” Duane said). Sonny drops her the second the local popular girl shows an interest. It’s a sad as it sounds. As a middle-aged woman myself, it fills me with renewed gratitude to be alive now, with my own income and my own Tinder if I want it.
Even all the side plots are sad: he falls out with his best friend, who then blinds him in one eye (?) before heading off to fight in Korea. The only apparently positive figure is the local poolhall owner, Sam the Lion, who looks after a young disabled boy called Billy (you don’t want to know how he is involved in the cow thing). Then he dies. Because this is the kind of book this is. It’s so sad it gets into the ridiculous. Everyone was lonely , everyone was not getting enough sex, or getting the wrong sex, or etc. Life is not all sad, just like it is not all happy.
Larry McMurtry is a great writer, so still I enjoyed it. But if you’ve never tried him, I recommend you start with his Pulitzer winner LONESOME DOVE (which this blog tells me I read a solid ten years ago)