"The OLDER the violin, the sweeter the music," Gus McCrae remarks in "Lonesome Dove," Larry McMurtry's magisterial western about a cattle drive from Texas to Montana and the havoc wreaked in its path. The silver-tongued devil's observation is about affairs of the heart, of course, but it could well serve as a description of the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer's career.
In his latest work, "Books: A Memoir," McMurtry, 72, takes an elegiac look back at his life as a buyer, seller and lover of the written word -- he boasts that Booked Up, the fabled store he opened in his hometown of Archer City, Texas, a few years back, has 28,000 secondhand volumes of the product we currently hear may soon be eclipsed by Kindle.
Unsurprisingly, McMurtry never felt at home in our nation's capital, where he opened the first incarnation of Booked Up in 1971.
"Washington is a civil service town in which the stars are not the politicians or the bureaucrats: the stars in D.C. are the journalists . . . ," he observes. "A world in which journalists are stars is not my world. What depressed me most in D.C. was that the various great houses I was invited to contained so few books."
The new memoir is an almost willfully minor piece from a major American writer, albeit one who has long gone far out of his way to avoid a serious consideration of his literary achievement.
In the course of producing more than 40 books, McMurtry's offhand, engaging voice and the passive, lost-boy narrators with whom the author can too easily be confused have continued to draw us in. And his ability to successfully communicate the emotional lives of women sets him apart -- far apart -- from such heralded male contemporaries as Mailer, Roth and Updike.
Typically, however, McMurtry's own assessment of his novels is unsparing: "Most were good, three to four were indifferent to bad, and two or three were really good. None, to my regret, were great." I beg to differ. Taken as a whole, the McMurtry corpus brings us inside the complicated world of human emotions more successfully than any other modern American writer.
Just for the record, no one else has written about Los Angeles as acutely. Perhaps it's because he comes as an outsider, but in "All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers" and "Somebody's Darling," he avoids the temptation to demonize Hollywood as a "Day of the Locust" phantasmagoria, to romanticize its mean-streets corruption, a la Raymond Chandler, or to knowingly depict the "scene" (too many authors to mention).
