Larry McMurtry’s “funny and brutal” (New York Times) landmark novel The Last Picture Show introduced the shrinking oil-patch town of Thalia, Texas, and its teenaged residents Duane, Sonny, and Jacy. In Texasville, the trio grew up to “adultery and madness, bankruptcy and boom times,” (New York Daily News). Now McMurtry takes his most colorful characters into their twilight years — in an unforgettable end to the Thalia saga.
Surrounded by his children, all of whom are going through tumultuous transitional times; his promiscuous wife, Karla, who is with her own demons; and his friend Sonny, who seems to be dying, Duane can’t make sense of his life anymore. The stark realization that he has spent his whole life in a miserable dust-bowl town throws him into a protracted end-of-life crisis — one that will hurtle him toward unexpected love, profoundly affect old friends, and cause him to embark on outlandish new beginning.
McMurtry’s strongest and most appealing contemporary novel since Terms of Endearment, Duane’s Depressed is utterly unsentimental, often hilarious, sometimes tragic and shocking, and in the end full of hope.At 62, ever-dependable oil man Duane Moore ditches his pickup and starts walking everywhere–deeply deviant behavior in one-stoplight Thalia, Texas. “It occurred to him one day–not in a flash, but through a process of seepage, a kind of gas leak into his consciousness–that most of his memories, from his first courtship to the lip of old age, involved the cabs of pickups,” Larry McMurtry writes. Yet oddly enough, Duane’s marriage, four children and nine grandchildren, his career highs and lows, all occurred when he was nowhere near his vehicle. Within days he has moved into his cabin on a hill, reacquired his dog, Shorty the Sixth (“an air of slight guilt was typical of all the Shortys”), and begun to think on these things. Of course, this brings on an additional problem: “He realized that for the first time in his life he had too much time to think; of course he had wanted more time to think, but that was probably because he hadn’t realized how tricky thinking could be.”
Luckily for readers, Duane’s attempts to go off the grid are far from successful. Thus do we have the deep pleasures of his comical and complex encounters with his wife, Karla, and family, not to mention some of Thalia’s singular citizens. As ever, McMurtry’s dialogue and narration snaps and surprises. He makes his hero’s solitude, and his increasing depression, infinitely intriguing. Will Duane’s attempts to literally and figuratively cultivate his garden succeed? Will he forge his way through the three volumes of Proust that his attractive new psychiatrist has prescribed in lieu of Prozac? Will the catfish that has found its way into his waterbed survive? Answers to these and many other questions await you in Duane’s Depressed, the final book of the marvelous trilogy McMurtry began with The Last Picture Show and Texasville. Let us pray that it turns into a quartet: we need far more of Duane and his family. For a start, his granddaughter Barbi–”a dark midge of a child”–merits a volume of her own. –Kerry Fried
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