The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurthy is set in a small Texas town in the 1950s. McMurthy didn’t idolize the time or the place, which is clearly modeled on his hometown. Instead, he pulled off the seemingly impossible: Lots of shocking descriptions of sex, but without being titillating. Sex with pregnant prostitutes, sex between a teenage boy and a woman more than twice his age, sex with farm animals, sexual molestation of little girls. McMurthy’s writing is objectively masterful, his imagery vivid and his characters well developed and interesting. There is humor, yet there is also an undertone of misogyny. Some of the writing reminded me of Cormac McCarthy.
Realistic descriptions of places like McMurthy’s 1950s town make you realize what has changed and what hasn’t. Consider this paragraph describing an impromptu trip by the protagonists to Mexico:
Mexico was more different from Thalia than either of the boys would have believed. The number of people who went about at night was amazing to them. In Thalia three or four boys on the courthouse square constituted a lively crowd, but the street of Matamoros teemed with people. Groups of men stood on what, in Thalia, would have been sidewalks, children rushed about in the dust, and old men sat against buildings.
This contrast between empty streets in the United States and streets full of life in other places still exists now, 70 years or so later.
It’s because of small episodes like this why I ended up liking the book.
Nehaveigur 