Tom's Two Cents : A Larry McMurtry 'Quintet'

In literature there is a trilogy (three books in sequence) and a tetralogy (four books in sequence), but seldom, if ever, a “quintology,” which apparently is not even a word, so Larry McMurtry resorts to calling his five books in sequence by a musical term, “quintet,” which it is definitely not! The books in question, and in successive order, are: “The Last Picture Show,” “Texasville,” “Duane’s Depressed,” “When the Light Goes” and “Rhino Ranch,” the last novel McMurtry has written, published in 2015.

The whole business of whether or not this is a “quintet” can be settled most easily by simply re-classifying “Texasville” as a film script rather than a novel. Indeed, it follows the modern tendency of many novels today to read like filmscripts, with heavy emphasis on dialogue and not much else. By his own admission, McMurtry has written at least sixty filmscripts, so it is easy enough to see why he lapsed into that writing mode after completing his magnum opus, “Lonesome Dove”, in 1985. By the time he wrote “Duane’s Depressed,” in 1999, McMurtry was back into a true novelistic mode, focusing throughout on the character of Duane Moore, Thalia’s football captain in a very early novel that proved to be a great film success—“The Last Picture Show.”

I’ve just re-read the first three cited above and only recently finished the fourth, “When the Light Goes.” Maybe I’ll read the last, “Rhino Ranch,” later, but right at the moment I’m “McMurtried Out.” (This marathon all started several weeks ago with McMurtry’s Memoirs. Lest it be thought that I’ve read tons of pages, let me quickly stress that the sum of all these eight books has been less than the sum of one Russian novel, that being “War and Peace”!) The best of these five is certainly the middle one, “Duane’s Depressed,” going as it does into a considerable depth of its male protagonist, Duane Moore, who does not emerge until “Texasville” as a personality in his own right.

The next-to-last novel is not a worthy sequel, and I’m guessing that the sequel to the sequel isn’t, either. Again, as in many of his books, McMurtry’s female characters are generally more interesting than his male ones, Gus MacRae and Woodrow Call excepted. Duane is interesting somewhat, but he is mostly a very passive character, dominated by strong women. And this so-called “quintet” begins to lose steam after “DD” very quickly, degenerating, in my opinion, into what, from a less prestigious author than McMurtry, I would call “cheap trash.” Be thus forewarned!