Canon Fever
From Larry L. King’s greatest to Mary Karr’s latest, our quirky choices for the best contemporary Texas writing.
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LARRY MCMURTRY, Lonesome Dove, 1985. The eighties were very, very good to Larry McMurtry. He became a millionaire, won a Pulitzer prize, and published six novels. Lonesome Dove won the hearts and minds of Texans and non-Texans alike, as loquacious Gus McCrae and taciturn Woodrow Call, two old Texas Rangers, rode straight out of nineteenth-century history into American myth on the longest danged cattle drive that never took place but should have. And McMurtry is not done with Gus and Call yet. There has been a sequel and a prequel, with maybe a couple more prequels to come. McMurtry deserves all of his success; he has been the dominant Texas novelist in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, and he’s not out of the running for this decade either.
R.G. VLIET, Scorpio Rising, 1985. Completed in the last year of a life shortened by cancer, this novel received excellent reviews nationally but has lapsed into obscurity in the author’s native state. It consists of two different stories, one set in 1976 in Massachusetts that tells of a displaced and misshapen Texan, a hunchback dwarf, who returns to his home state to attend a funeral when suddenly the time shifts to 1902 and that section ends. The second part, set between 1904 and 1907, has plenty of classic Southern gothic family skeletons—genetic degeneracy, murder, revenge, and so on—and it’s Vliet’s imagery and poetic storytelling skill that hold the two stories together.
STEPHEN HARRIGAN, A Natural State, 1988. Harrigan, a contributing editor at Texas Monthly, is one of the heirs of the Bedichek line of nature writing, and this volume shows the author’s thoughtful attachment to a state that he wisely notes is “an imperfect place in which to seek epiphanies about nature.” These essays reveal a quiet affection for rivers and islands and deserts and canyons as well as some worry about such man-made habitats as zoos and underwater contrivances for exhibiting Ralph the Swimming Pig.
LAWRENCE WRIGHT, In the New World: Growing Up With America, 1960-1984, 1988. The New York Times called this book a sort of Sun Belt Sorrows of Young Werther, and that’s about right. Despite its rather ponderous title, this thinking-man’s baby boomer memoir offers valid insights into how a well-brought-up conservative Christian youth growing up in Dallas in the sixties was radically changed—by the assassination of JFK, the war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and attending college in the hedonistic New Orleans—into a liberal and a conscientious objector.
SHELBY HEARON, Owning Jolene, 1989. In the wittiest novel by this prolific author, Hearon’s protagonist narrator is a college girl chameleon who has spent her young life playing a dazzling array of roles laid out for her by her eccentric mother and “normal” father, who are divorced. Family members keep kidnapping Jolene, and the title’s “owning” comes to refer to her body as both self and image, since one of her roles is posing nude for a famous painter who is also her lover. A funny comedy with loads of likeable characters, the novel bounces around Texas in the oil-bust eighties.
DAVE HICKEY, Prior Convictions, 1989. A promising writer of fiction in the sixties, Hickey published several stories in campus and little magazines and then abandoned fiction altogether, instead becoming one of the savviest avant-garde art critics in the nation. This unexpected collection has therefore a kind of archaeological value with reprints of interesting work such as “I’m Bound to Follow the Longhorn Cows” and “An Essay on Style,” notable for granting intelligence to fraternity boys.
WILLIAM HUMPHREY, No Resting Place, 1989. The novel begins with a schoolboy historical pageant during the centennial celebration of 1936, designed to commemorate the storied events of a hundred years before. When the father of the narrator learns that his son has chosen to play the role of Mirabeau B. (for Buonaparte) Lamar, the second president of the Republic of Texas, the father is enraged, for he wants no son of his to lionize that “sorry rascal.” He traces Lamar’s perfidy in the destruction of the Cherokee Nation, from the removal of Cherokee in Texas to an internment camp in Georgia and back again to Texas, where under Lamar’s presidency, Chief Bowles and his tribespeople are slaughtered.
JEFF LONG, Duel of Eagles: The Mexican and U.S. Fight for the Alamo, 1990. If Oliver Stone were ever to make a movie about Texas history, this is the book he’d base it on. Jeff Long’s contemptuous view of Texas’ fabled past aroused tempers around the state, but nearly everybody conceded that it was a good read despite its sledgehammer debunking of William B. Travis as a syphilitic satyr and Sam Houston as an alcoholic opium addict. In Long’s conspiracy-theory view of history, the “so-called Texas Revolution was designed only to wrench a huge chunk of Mexican territory free of Mexican control long enough for the United States to annex it.”
AMERICO PAREDES, George Washington Gómez, 1990. Originally written when the author was a young man, between 1936 and 1940, this novel was not published until Paredes was a figure much honored in the Hispanic and Anglo communities for his ground-breaking folkloric study of turn-of-the-century Mexican American hero Gregorio Cortez. Gómez traces the life of an intelligent, ambitious young Hispanic in Brownsville who wants to be a leader of his people but who sells them out by working for some sinister federal agency. The novel is notable for its overtly negative portrayals of Anglos and for a savage sketch of one K. Hank Harvey, a windbag racist who is clearly based on J. Frank Dobie.
SANDRA CISNEROS, Woman Hollering Creek, 1991. In these stories, Texas’ leading Chicana author explores in politically correct fashion the feelings and put-upon lives of passionate Hispanic women living in an Anglo world. The title story makes excellent use of the haunting name of the creek that crosses Interstate 10 near San Antonio. Recently the recipient of a MacArthur prize, an empowering gift from the (Anglo) gods, Cisneros is reported to be working on a novel.
CORMAC MCCARTHY, All the Pretty Horses, 1992. A surfeit of riches: The relocation of McCarthy from Tennessee to El Paso is the best import from the Volunteer State since Davy Crockett came down to the Alamo. Nobody can agree yet on which of McCarthy’s Texas novels is the best, Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, or The Crossing, but Horses, which won a National Book Award, is certainly the most accessible. In rhythms derived from Hemingway and Faulkner, it tells the stirring story of three Texas boys who get into some high-grade adventures in northern Mexico. Hero John Grady Cole, at sixteen, can ride better, endure more pain, and love longer than is entirely believable. Although he speaks vernacular English, his Spanish is pure Castillian, but so what? It’s high literary romance in the best tradition of Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville.
MARY KARR, The Liars’ Club, 1995. Best memoir in a long time. Set mainly in 1961 in the industrialized, chemically sodden lowlands of East Texas, Karr’s account of her incredibly dysfunctional family is a poignant page-turner. It’s also very funny. She resurrects honorable expressions that I haven’t heard for thirty years, like “I shit you not.” She also, no easy feat, creates three unforgettable characters—a hard-working, hard-drinking father; a high-strung mother who marries instead of dates; and Karr, a nervy, smartassed kid and survivor.
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