![]() ![]() ![]() “Texasville” read like the work of a tired writer, one whose imagination had begun to betray him, who had chosen to re-examine old themes because he felt he had nothing new to say. ![]() This process began in 1985 with “Texasville,” which brought back the characters from “The Last Picture Show” with less than satisfying results. In recent years, however, McMurtry has narrowed the scope of his writing, turning his back on these more fluid associations to write a series of specific sequels, instead. It’s an ambitious-and expansive-approach to fiction, erasing arbitrary distinctions between peripheral figures and protagonists to concentrate on the inevitable connections between every one of us, until we are left with a larger apprehension of the world. ![]() Thus, Patsy Carpenter, whose story forms the substance of McMurtry’s finest novel, “Moving On,” reappears in “All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers,” while Emma, her best friend, becomes the focus of “Terms of Endearment,” which recounts the circumstances of her life and death. Particularly in his early work, McMurtry constructs a universe as fully realized as William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, in which individual books are not so much separate as part of some larger progression that seems to exist beyond the page. One of the things I’ve always found compelling about Larry McMurtry is the breadth of his literary vision, the way his characters reappear from book to book with all the serendipity of life. ![]()
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