A story of a love triangle in small town Texas. And when I say small, I mean small. When there are only about two women in the whole place, and one of them is ugly, you can see where the triangle gets more likely.
It’s told in three sections, one for each person in the triangle. Wikipedia tells me McMurtry was married twice, both times to women, which surprises me because on the evidence of this book I would say he had never met a woman. The girl’s section of the book was just bizarre. It is clear throughout which man she ought to have married, and she chooses the other, and so I thought her section would be a ‘reveal.’ What it revealed is that McMurtry thinks women are basically irrational, don’t know what’s good for them, and can’t explain their own thought process.
That said, I still liked the book. The charm is in the setting, as with other books of his that I’ve read ( LONESOME DOVE, THE LAST PICTURE SHOW (minus the cow-rape of course)). Try this, on a hailstorm:
I guess the worst was Old Man Hurshel Monroe getting his skull cracked outside the door of the bank. They say Beulah Monroe found the hailstone that conked him and kept it home in the icebox for nearly ten years, till one of her grandkids ate it for an all-day sucker.
Or this, the very opening of the book:
When I woke up Dad was standing by the bed shaking my foot. I opened my eyes, but he never stopped shaking it. He shook it like it was a fence post and he was testing it to see if it was in the ground solid enough. All my life that’s the way he’d wake me up—I hated it like poison. Once I offered to set a glass of water by the bed, so he could pour that over me in the mornings and wake me up, but Dad wouldn’t do it. I set the water out for him six or seven times, and he just let it sit and shook my foot anyway. Sometimes though, if he was thirsty, he’d drink the water first.
I googled the author and found him to be a rather charming man. I love his transactional approach to writing. Try this:
If I could not write another word of fiction and make a living, I would. But I can’t. I live off of fiction, mostly. I have a novel coming out this year, Loop Group, and I have one more novel that I owe Simon and Schuster, about an aging gunfighter. I’m getting close to thirty novels in all, I think. That’s a lot of novels. It’s kind of embarrassing. I don’t even offer them to my friends anymore. They all stopped reading at fifteen or twenty. When a new one comes out, I think, “Do I really want to mail this one around?”