Review: The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

What stayed with me most about The Last Picture Show was how much was going on beneath the usual image of small-town life in the early 1950s. For a novel published in 1966, it is remarkably open about sexual tension, infidelity, prostitution, loneliness, cruelty, and even bestiality. So much of it is presented matter-of-factly, as simply part of life in this rural Texas town. There was more meat there than the sanitized version of the period or of rural America that people often imagine.

The novel is a coming-of-age story, and in that way it reminded me of books like The Outsiders and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. The contexts are different, but they all involve young people grappling with the dirty realities of the world and trying to make sense of lives in which there is not always much to grab onto.

That is especially true in Thalia. High school sports become a form of meaning-making, even though they are often bad at it. People gather at the pool hall because there are so few other places to go. Sonny Crawford and Duane Jackson look for sex, entertainment, status, or escape wherever they can find it. The town feels limited without ever feeling simple. McMurtry has a strong sense of the world these characters inhabit, and I enjoyed the way he moves them into different relationships and confrontations.

Even though he is the protagonist, Sonny isn't especially compelling on his own. The power of the novel came less from its central character than from the grittiness of the world around him and the desperation for connection that runs through almost everyone in it.

McMurtry’s openness feels both honest and exploitative. Billy is the clearest example of the latter. Billy has an unspecified intellectual disability. Often, he is both taken care of and the but of jokes by Sonny and his friends. In McMurtry's writing, he is never treated as a full person but rather a prop through which everyone else can enact their morality. Sam the Lion’s protection of Billy helps establish Sam’s decency, while other characters’ neglect or cruelty helps establish something about them. Billy is stripped of agency so that the people around him can be understood as good or bad. His death has an almost sacrificial quality, but the novel never gives him an interior life equal to the symbolic weight placed on him.

Ruth Popper is more complicated. The neglected wife of an indecent high school coach, she begins an affair with Sonny (also in high school). Their romance occurs as Ruth recovers from having a tumor removed from her breast.  Her complexity of seeking relationship, finding her own sense of worth, and trying to find the loneliness of her world makes her sitaution feels intriguing for a novel from 1966. Of course, this is just a few years after the novel, The Graduate by Charles Webb came out (The film adaptation of The Graduate; and this novel's film adaptation would come out in 1971).  Her attempt to feel something in a life that has become hard and empty is one of the most interesting parts of the book.

Her final confrontation with Sonny is especially ambiguous. It is not a clean reconciliation. Ruth pushes Sonny toward a deeper realization of what he has done, but the more important change may be in Ruth herself. Whether Sonny changes or not, Ruth has. She seems to have gained a stronger sense of her own individuality, freedom, and self-worth.

She can still be empathetic toward Sonny as a teenager who is trying to figure himself out. She can acknowledge his pain without becoming fully subjected to his whims again. She can care about him while also controlling more of her own narrative.

That connects to what I think may be the novel’s clearest sense of value: the act of being seen, and of recognizing the pain that other people carry. Sam the Lion sees something in Billy that others refuse to see. Ruth eventually has some part of her pain acknowledged. The world of the novel is hard, and people are navigating complexities that those around them may never fully understand. Innocence is repeatedly destroyed, whether in Billy’s fate or in the treatment of the teacher who is accused of being homosexual and attacked.

At the same time, the novel is not only about Sonny and Duane growing up. It is about Thalia ending. The picture show is closing, the town’s way of life is disappearing, and it is unclear what will take its place. In that sense, the book connects for me with Gretel Ehrlich’s The Solace of Open Spaces and with the closing-frontier impulse associated with Westerns: the end of life as people know it in a particular place, a life that is simultaneously celebrated, fetishized, and mourned.

But McMurtry doesn't fully embrace the mourning. He does not make Thalia into an innocent world that deserves uncomplicated nostalgia. This is a place filled with boredom, cruelty, exploitation, and limited opportunity. The novel seems less interested in romanticizing what is disappearing than in asking the reader to consider where the value was.

I have never been a big Western fan, and I am not sure I have read anything else by McMurtry, but this felt like an interesting way into his work. I enjoyed the prose, the relationships and confrontations, and the strength of the world he creates, even when I found some of its characterizations troubling.

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