Mike Shea on the month’s new releases
John Kruth
Da Capo Press
(Read an excerpt)
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JOHN KRUTH clearly intends to revere his subject’s memory in TO LIVE’S TO FLY: THE BALLAD OF THE LATE, GREAT TOWNES VAN ZANDT, a biography of the difficult, beautiful mess that was Van Zandt before his 1997 death at age 52. But while Kruth admirably focuses on the singer-songwriter’s music—he’s best known for writing “Pancho and Lefty,” a hit for Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard—he also acknowledges his legendary bouts of drunkenness and drug use (though, curiously, he lets Van Zandt’s junk addiction go unmentioned for the first third of the book, until the offhand disclosure that the musician was “trying to kick his heroin habit”). Kruth relies heavily on interviews with friends, family, and colleagues, who might be overly fawning in their praise of the lanky troubadour’s charisma and genius but are equally brutal confronting his personal failings and crippling depression. Van Zandt’s legacy is complicated, and he’s survived by an uneven body of recorded work and an ongoing estate battle over royalties. This flawed biography is only a start at making sense of it all.
Larry McMurtry
Simon & Schuster
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Be thankful LARRY MCMURTRY decided his Thalia trilogy deserved a fourth book, because WHEN THE LIGHT GOES is an essential (though not to say concluding) chapter in the Duane Moore saga. Duane, introduced as a callow teen in The Last Picture Show but now a big-deal oilman in his tiny hometown, feels time nipping at his heels and fears he can’t outrun despair. An unexpected sexual encounter with his shrink improves his frame of mind somewhat—even if her lesbian bent puts a definite horizon on the relationship and age has taken some of the steel out of Duane’s sword. Better, an unconsummated flirtation with the intriguing Annie Cameron, a fresh-faced geologist, threatens to blossom into something very much like real companionship. When the Light Goes is McMurtry’s piquantly comic celebration of the absurdity of aging. Duane might mourn the past, but he’s still breathing—and, damn, those are fine crab rolls at the new Sri Lankan Asia Wonder Deli. Sometimes that’s reason enough to get out of bed in the morning.
Steven Saylor
The Austin novelist famous for his Roma Sub Rosa series of historical mysteries delivers his magnum opus, Roma, this month. The engrossing tale tracks Rome from its origins as a stop on a salt trade route through the story of Antonius and Cleopatra.
Was it inevitable that your series would lead to an epic novel? Like history itself, it all seems inevitable—in retrospect. My publisher in England proposed I write a “big” book. When I thought “big,” I thought of the kind of multigenerational saga that makes a city or a country itself the main character.
Do you expose any popular misconceptions about Rome’s origins? Legend says that Rome was founded by twin orphans, Romulus and Remus, who were raised by a she-wolf. Until recently, modern historians have dismissed the legend wholesale, but there’s currently a lot of rethinking among scholars. In my book, Romulus and Remus did indeed exist.
Would you compare twenty-first-century American governance with any in Rome’s history? All the issues Americans face in a polarized republic, the Romans dealt with first. Staggering wealth brought in by foreign conquests only increased inequality at home; a handful of men, like Caesar, became far too powerful. The American republic has so far lasted only about half as long as Rome’s. Whether it will end with the rise of an all-powerful executive, as happened with the emperor Augustus, remains to be seen.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, was it? One of my most satisfying—and challenging—tasks in Roma was making its eleven city maps. The first shows Rome in 1000 B.C. Each subsequent map adds more and more man-made details—altars, walls, temples, statues, arches—until the final map is packed. The architectural and engineering feats of the Romans were crucial in their success.
Roma: Steven Saylor, published by St. Martin’s.
