Explore Last Picture Show Conceived By Larry McMurtry Classified In Readable Copy

lived in West Texas for a decade in my teens and twenties, this book is pure nostalgia for me, Its also so achingly painful that it leaves me feeling empty and lonely at the end, ”The only really important thing that I came in to tell you was that life is very monotonous, Things happen the same way over and over again, I think its more monotonous in this part of the country than it is other places, but I dont really know that it may be monotonous everywhere.
Im sick of it myself, Everything gets old if you do it often enough, ”

Set during the earlys in the small Texas town of Thalia, the story revolves around Sonny, an independent high school senior who plays football, hangs out at the pool hall and goes to the movies at the towns only theater.
Sonnys best friend Duane is dating Jacy, the local rich girl, and Sonny harbors his own secret and guilty crush on her, As

their last year of school plays out, Sonny is often disinterested and bored with the predictable routines of the people hes known his whole life, but he begins to learn that many of them have depths he never suspected.


McMurtry does an excellent job of immersing the reader in the kind of ennui that can come with living in a small town where it seems that nothing ever happens, and the occasional shocking event is smoothed over by the soothing blanket of the mundane.
Even the smarter characters like Jacys mother Lois and Sam, the owner of the pool hall, seem to have piled up the weight of their regrets to the point where they are unable to break free of the lack of inertia that keeps them all rooted in Thalia.


This is a terrific short novel and one of my favorite McMurtrys, However, this reread has presented me with a dilemma, Ive read the sequel Texasville before, but its been a while and I think I generally liked it, I didnt realize that there are three more books after that, Im tempted to read them all, but McMurtry has burned me before with the subpar sequels and prequels to the excellent sitelinkLonesome Dove.
I'm on the fence as to whether I should give them a chance or not, The farm boys having sex with a blind cow was like the fourth worst part of this book, Impressive “for no reason he could think of life was becoming more complicated, ”.stars

Larry McMurtry is one of those writers whose books I enjoy so much, because they are his books, I think if I had read the story contained in THE LAST PICTURE SHOW written by someone else that I would have hated it.
But McMurtry writes people, with all their complications and foibles, so unassumingly that I buy in, Every time!

Taking place in Thalia, Texas the scene of two other excellent standalone novels in the “Thalia trilogy” in the earlys, this novel, with its focus on teenagers as they leave high school behind is sensitive, harsh, disgusting, crude, and tenderhearted.
All the things that teenagers can be, depending on the day,

With its focus on Sonny and Duane, best friends, and the girl they both have feelings for Jacy Farrow the story is written in therd person omniscient point of view and the point of view we are getting changes from section to section.
This device is used effectively in this text, and besides the three main characters we jump into the heads of many secondary characters at key instances which greatly enhances the scope of the novel.


There are lots of standout sections in the text, but here are a few

The poignancy of this moment gave me pause.
A character says, “The reason Im so crazy is because nobody cares anything about me, I dont guess theres anyone I care much about, either, Its my own fault, though I havent the guts to try and do anything about it, ” The sadness and harsh personal realization in that statement are bold,

Chaptersampof this book are notable,
Chapteris harsh. What happens there is disgusting and awful and part of the petty cruelty of young people that is by and large unintentional, McMurtry just presents the action without commentary by any of the characters and it messes with the reader, You want someone to say, “This isnt right”, but no one does, The author forces you to make that judgment yourself,
Chapteris a sensitive and absorbing portrait of a forbidden love affair, Because of the individuals involved I should have been horrified, I wasnt.

As a former English teacher I had to laugh long and hard when a character expresses dismay at a male English teacher in the local high school as “thats a womans job.
” And then I remembered I was the only male in the English department I use to work with, Ha!

I had to grimace when one of the young protagonists expresses dismay at the end of a love affair, He muses, “It was very confusing to him because he had always thought you were supposed to get whoever you really loved, ” Who hasnt learned the truth of this Only the very lucky, I imagine,

As is usually the case with a Larry McMurtry novel, the characterization is spot on, There are some beautifully rendered secondary characters in this book that I adored, And there were some that I detested, I despised the characters of Coach Popper and Jacy Farrow, Hated them. Although I would be lying if I did not admit that McMurtry drew them in such a touching, nonjudgmental manner that I could still see and empathize with their humanity.


There are lots of quotes I marked in the text, For the sake of brevity, here are just a few:
“Once you got rich youd have to spend all your time staying rich, and thats hard thankless work.
”
“Something about it was good, even if much was bad, ”
“Loneliness is like ice, After youve been lonely long enough you dont even realize youre cold, but you are, ”
“I dont want to be old, It dont fit me!”
“Romance might not last, but it was something while it did, ”
“but some things had to be accepted if one was to become a woman of the world, ”
“Win a few, lose a few, Thats really the way it goes, all through life, ”
“He felt as though life was completely beyond him, ”
“He had just begun to realize how hard it was to get from day to day if one felt hopeless, ”

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW is another example of Larry McMurtry creating a text peopled with real folks, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
And in his hands it feels like they are all supposed to be there,

Goodness, do I love this writer! Sonny, Duane, and Jacy come of age in a dusty Texas town, What will happen to them once they graduate high school

I snagged this for the princely sum of,on the Kindle. It was worth every penny,

As I said in the teaser, The Last Picture Show is a coming of age tale, a tale of what happens to people as they get older and drift apart.
While I never read it before, it fit like a favorite tshirt,

Larry McMurty paints a vivid picture of small town life as Sonny and the rest graduate high school and struggle to find their places in the world.
Duane wants to marry Jacy, Jacy wants to do something that will get the town talking, And Sonny wants Duane's girl, Nothing really goes the way anyone planned, Just like real life.

I thought the three main characters were very realistic depictions of teenagers, not just some middle age guy's faded memories of what high school was like, and likeable, despite their character flaws.
Sonny, in particular, was kind of a walking train wreck but I wound up caring about him anyway, By the end of the book, I was feeling almost as lonesome as he was, While all of the characters did some questionable things, everything rang true,

McMurtry's writing has the same bullshitting on the front porch feel Joe Lansdale's does and I have to think he was an influence on Lansdale on some level.
The Last Picture Show feels a lot like the coming of age stories Lansdale has been writing the last twenty years or so, only with less cursing.


There were tons of quotable lines, All three main characters said stupid things that were a lot like things I would have said back in the day,

If you're looking for a book about friendship, love, finding your place in the world, and a bunch of high school seniors trying to have drunken sex with a heifer, look no farther.
.out ofstars.

A sleepy, dusty old town filled with warm and wonderful characters, Frustrations of small town living are in every day and still the people move forward,
Of the three main characters, Duane, Jacy amp Sonny, I like Sonny the best, But the lives of all of these characters is poignant and warm as they find their way through their last year of high school and into the world.

I look forward to continuing their stories in sitelinkTexasville one day soon, After sitelinkLonesome Dove, I wanted to see what McMurtry's writing was like when he wasn't invoking the Great West, The novel dedicated to the small Texas town where he grew up,sitelinkThe Last Picture Show, is a rather bleak look at life in thes.
Sonny is in high school with his best friend Duane and still a virgin, In fact, the entire book is about the discovery of sex of most of the primary characters, I was a bit taken back by the casual mention of sex with farm animals that was engaged by both Sonny and Duane and their friends I guess things were downhill from the Lonesome Dove world where this was rare and frowned upon.
I have no idea whether this was/is so prevalent, but then, having lived in Texas and traveled around it some, I suppose it is believable they did elect Ted Cruz after all to the Senate.


The primary tension is around Sonny's listlessness, his affair with the wife of the high school sports coach, the illfated relationship between Duane and the beautiful Jacey, Jacey and her willful sexpot mother Loris, and others in the community.
The writing is ok, but the bleakness got a bit depressing, As Loris explains to Jacey while encouraging her to sleep with Duane much to Jacey's surprise, "Things happen the same way over and over again.
I think it's more monotonous in this part of the country than it is in other places, . . Everything gets old if you do it often enough, I don't particularly care who you marry, but if you want to find out about monotony real quick just marry Duane, " p.This matter of fact talking is particular to Loris but speaks volumes about sexual attitudes marry being a euphemism for sex throughout and just feels so sad and helpless.
Expressed differently to Sonny by Ruth, hisyo lover, "Loneliness is like ice, After you've been lonely enough you don't even realize you're cold but you are, It's like I was a refrigerator that had never been defrosted at allnever, " p

The book was an ok read but falls far short of the beauty and vision of sitelinkLonesome Dove, I also felt that the characters, as well drawn as they were, still lacked a bit of depth in many places particularly Duane and the coach and the book left me wanting and feeling sad.


The book is the first of McMurtry's Thalia series of five books, I did not develop enough sympathy for either Sonny or Duane to continue along these dusty, dreary north Texas landscapes to continue, I will finish the Lonesome Dove books and maybe give the Houston series, in particular sitelinkTerms of Endearment a chance, though, We've all driven by them on the way to places more important small towns in the middle of nowhere with its main street stores now boarded up.
Maybe there's a gas station you'd rather take your chances running out of gas than stop at and a cafe with one or two customers wearing greasy, battered baseball caps.
You're surprised when you see signs of life in the houses a red geranium in a Mexican pot by the front door, How do people live here What do they do all day You speed away before the smell of death settles on you, The dying of a way of life that was once vibrant is Larry McMurtry's concern in this book and in most of his other "cowboy" books.
There's elements of nostalgia in the book, as clearly some good things are being lost, but the nostalgia is not the sugary kind.
These small towns are still populated by human beings with the kind of flaws and ugliness you'll find in the suburbs, Adolescents still must find a way to grow up and ways to spend the crazy energy that sizzles in their limbs, One of the reasons I read McMurtry's books now and then is for the lack of pretense and style in his narrations, which doesn't mean he doesn't work hard at it.
In a lot of books there is a separation between the narrator and the author but in this book the separation is not there, or if it is, the gap is very small.
You can feel the author telling you the story directly as if the two of you were out camping and he decides to tell you a story to fill the two hours before you go to sleep.
And you sit there, quiet and delighted because the guy is funny and also not afraid to stop being funny and describe things that are sad and he does it with the raconteur's expertise, which means that there's tons of detail of the kind that takes you there to the place and to the mind of the characters.
The story telling is not fancy, He'll tell you for example that Sonny was depressed and won't dwell too much on it assuming, as he should, that you know how that feels.
If you are starting to write or if you've done it for a long time and find yourself stuck, this is a good book to read.
It loosens you up from the notions of perfection that might be burdening you, Tell the story that's in you as best you can, as if you were telling it to a good friend who enjoys hearing it as much as you do telling it.
.