The LAST PICTURE SHOW : A Novel
by Larry McMurtry
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Book Summary Information
Author: Larry McMurtryEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-01-14
ISBN: 0684853868
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Accessories:
- Still Wild : Short Fiction of the American West 1950 to the Present
- Telegraph Days: A Novel
- The Desert Rose : A Novel
Book Reviews of The LAST PICTURE SHOW : A Novel
Book Review: Gone with the wind
Summary: 5 Stars
Movie references, of course, from time to time are mentioned during the narrative of Larry McMurtry's "The last picture show" - a novel more about nostalgia of a lost time and innocence than cinema itself:
"The movies were Charlene's life , she was fond of saying"
"[He] had always thought your were supposed to get whoever you really loved. That was the way it worked in the movies."
"It would have taken `Winchester '73' or `Red River' or some big movie like that to have crowded out the memories the boys kept having."
However no person in this novel is guides his or her life according to movie stars or characters. This is a book of real people living their silly lives that haven't much in common with the rich and the beautiful. McMurtry populates his narrative with sad and lost souls and the agonizing movie theater -as the agonizing city where these people live - works as beautiful metaphor of lost chances and lives in a stand still.
McMurtry has a keen eye for characters - specially the female ones. The women in the novel are vivid and their problems and aspirations are quite touching. Some of them long for love, some for money and a few for both. There are also some girls here who only want to be alive and keep up with their nearly pointless lives. Jacy and her mother, Lois, are memorable creations, but the most beautiful character in the whole "The last picture show" is Ruth Popper, the neglected coach's wife who finds love in the most unexpected place. But in the world where this novel is set, loving equals sadness, suffering, not redemption or anything nice. They are characters condemned to live their miserable and suffering lives alone no matter how surrounded of people they are.
The male characters, on the other hand, aren't as developed as the female ones. The men in this book aren't very different. The two protagonists, Sonny and Duane, are so much alike that sometimes the reader must stop and thinking who is who. Not a single man in "The last picture show" knows how to handle their woman - specially the women they love. They may spent the whole novel longing for someone, and when he finally has a chance with this person he wouldn't know what to do. Even the older and married man aren't very good characters mostly because the writer never dives into their psyche as McMurtry does with the women here. They are plain - not uninteresting but never as deep or believable as the ladies.
McMurtry is capable of creating the most beautiful descriptions - specially when he is dealing with the emptiness, that is when places and lives get mixed, when the past seem a faraway place and the character in the book people of a long and forgotten (maybe overcame) past.
Trying to unfold a panorama of a small town's live, McMurtry brings to the narrative way to many characters and some strings never are properly pulled. Some events aren't as build up as other ones, and when they happen they read unbelievable and most unnecessary. But despite of - or because of - its flaws "The last picture show" is a beautiful novel guided by melancholy of a time and place that don't seem to exist any more. They may have been gone with the wind - the very same that blows through the
Summary of The LAST PICTURE SHOW : A Novel
The Last Picture Show is one of Larry McMurtry's most powerful, memorable novels -- the basis for the enormously popular movie of the same name. Set in a small, dusty, Texas town, The Last Picture Show introduced the characters of Jacy, Duane, and Sonny: teenagers stumbling toward adulthood, discovering the beguiling mysteries of sex and the even more baffling mysteries of love. Populated by a wonderful cast of eccentrics and animated by McMurtry's wry and raucous humor, The Last Picture Show is wild, heartbreaking, and poignant -- a coming-of-age novel that resonates with the magical passion of youth.In The Last Picture Show Larry McMurtry introduced characters who would show up again in later novels, Texasville and Duane's Depressed. This first volume of the trilogy drops the reader into the one-stoplight town of Thalia, Texas, where Duane Moore, his buddy Sonny, and his girlfriend Jacy are all stumbling along the rocky road to adulthood. Duane wants nothing more than to marry Jacy; Sonny wants what Duane has; and Jacy wants to get the hell out of Thalia any way she can. This is not a novel of big ideas or defining moments; over the course of a year Duane and Jacy make up and break up, Sonny begins an affair with his high-school football coach's wife, and the only movie house in town closes its doors forever. Yet it is out of these small-town experiences--a nude swimming party in Wichita, a failed sexual encounter during a senior trip, a botched elopement, an enlistment--that McMurtry builds his tale and reveals his characters' hearts. No epiphanies here, just a lot of hard-won experience that leaves none of his protagonists particularly wiser, though they're all a little sadder by the end. --Alix Wilber
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