The Last Picture Show

Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture show is set in 1950s Thalia, Texas. An oil town on the last legs of the boom, Thalia boasts a single commercial strip comprised of Sam the Lion’s pool hall, a truck-stop diner and a failing picture-show theatre. It’s the kind of community where high school football provides the only diversion from hard-scrabble Christianity and roughnecking the rigs. While the book might be characterized as a coming-of-age story centered on a group of high-school seniors, the American small town is the elephant in every empty room of McMurtry’s fictionalized township.

On it’s face, The Last Picture Show visits the familiar arc of two young best friends confronting manhood. It’s the way this theme is elaborated however – avoiding both stoic Hemingway-esque rights of passage and debaucherous wild-oats-sewing clichés – that gives the book it’s poignancy. McMurtry paints this transition as a painful and awkward series of revelations and accepted responsibilities that passes shared if undiscussed between Sonny Crawford, McMurtry’s protagonist, and his best friend Duane Jackson. What’s more, something about the stripped-down simplicity of Thalia life - the pitiable meagerness of the dreams that sustain it’s natives - provides an incredibly pure backdrop against which to explore the basic longings of these aging confidants.

While often humorous, McMurtry cuts the eager back-seat fumblings of his teenage subjects time and again with the brutal truth of what exactly is lost when one grows old. The author reminds us that before American society began tacitly vouchsafing young people their college years - or even the excitement of a good war - high-school grads met adulthood with a resignation and unspoken-of (and perhaps even unrecognized) loss that is devastatingly chronicled in these pages. Maybe in the end the book’s big meditation is on what it means to be alone, with questions about the ephemeral nature of youth, lust, and scandal all ultimately ceding to the stilted denouement of Sonny and Duane’s friendship. Enter the small town.

It’s as if, denuded of all the stimulating distractions of the city, the real emotional honesty of loneliness, growing-up and old, or even finding a tolerable place just to be in the world is somehow allowed to breath on the vacant Texas plains. And ultimately, it’s this absence of stimulus in Thalia – even more then their competing affections for the bewitching Jacy Farrow - that separates Sonny and Duane. The vacuous backdrop of the small town somehow allows their needs to be articulated more simply and yet more subtly; it’s a gracefulness that would hardly translate to the urban theatre.

Via revisiting the small town we as readers can return to the foundations of the lives we lead as social animals – putting momentarily aside our workout schedules, our 401ks, what bars we’re drinking at with whom while we TiVo which shows – and I think it’s a return worth making. In The Last Picture Show McMurtry suggests that when all else is stripped-away it’s our human attachments that drive us from bed each morning; that in small town America even “lives of quiet desperation” are importantly interconnected and important to the whole.