Larry McMurtry and the literature of place.
I didn’t think, at first, of Larry McMurtry as a Texas writer. It seems impossible in retrospect, but there it is. I bought his 1972 novel All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers at a book sale, long tables arrayed across the wooden floor of a Manhattan high school gymnasium, slanted rows of dog-eared paperbacks. I would go to that sale every year and come home with stacks of titles. They were cheap—10¢ apiece or at most a quarter—which meant that for $5 or so, I could pick up a full slate of summer reading. This was the mid-1970s, and I was in my early teens.
For me, the books I bought represented promises or invitations, the earliest emerging signposts of what I imagined as the broad terrain of literature, a landscape I was desperate to map. I was already a reader, but there was a difference, I was discovering, between what I’d been instructed to read and what I encountered on my own. The writers to whom I gravitated included Sam Greenlee, Richard Condon, and Erica Jong. Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, and the Beats. McMurtry felt to me like he was part of that. “All I knew was that I wanted to be somewhere near North Beach, where the Beat Generation lived,” the narrator of All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers, a novelist named Danny Deck, enthuses after moving from Houston to San Francisco. “Of course most of them had stopped living there years before, but in my mind that was where they lived when they were not in Denver, or on the road, and when I walked the streets I always half expected to come around a corner and see Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg.”
My copy of was a Pocket Books mass-market paperback. I’m looking at it right now (or an image of it on the internet): title in all caps, black against the white background of the cover, and a full-color illustration, in the photo-realistic. That was what I wanted, to have big feelings. I wanted to play by my own rules. McMurtry seemed to be offering a kind of road map. It did not occur to me that the map he was creating had everything to do with place.
