none) Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond BY MARK BUSBY
October 29, 1999: Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond by Larry McMurtry Earlier this year when Larry McMurtry, Texas' preeminent novelist for almost 40 years, published his 23rd novel, Duane's Depressed , which wrapped up the Thalia trilogy that began with The Last Picture Show (1966) and continued with Texasville (1987), he announced that he had written his final novel. Barely had the loud, sad sigh escaped from Texas readers when Crazy Horse , a biography of the famous Sioux warrior, appeared. Now, hard on the hooves of those two books is Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond , a memoir on cowboying, writing, storytelling, reading and book collecting, aging, and fatherhood, and it reminds us once again why Larry McMurtry's shadow looms large over the Texas landscape. McMurtry initially made his presence felt in nonfiction with his first essay collection, In a Narrow Grave (1968). There he wrote about growing up in northwest Texas and hearing the sounds of the passing cowboy god. As he listened to the wind blowing along the Brazos and across the Llano Estacado, McMurtry found "the music of departure faint, the god almost out of hearing." The concluding essay in that collection, "Take My Saddle From the Wall: A Valediction," is dazzling, one of the best Texas essays ever written. Since then, McMurtry's fiction has often focused on the moment when an old order gives way to a new, especially the old rural Southwest's uneasy transition to the new urban order. In this new book transitions are central, too, with the major transitional figure the author himself. | |
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