What he understood - the real point of the joke - was that every writer is a regionalist, that literature has no center except for the human heart. In a number of his books, most famously the 1966 novel “ The Last Picture Show,” he recast Archer City as Thalia, a community caught between the present and the past. McMurtry, after all, was nothing if not a regionalist he lived for much of his life in Archer City, the small north Texas town where he was born. On the other, it is a provocation, a challenge to the literary status quo. On the one hand, it reads like a joke he’s playing on himself. In it, he plays with a cat while wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with the slogan “Minor Regional Novelist.” Such an image almost perfectly reflects what made McMurtry such a feisty talent, self-deprecating and pointed by turns. When I think of Larry McMurtry - who died on Thursday at 84 - I recall a photograph taken in the late 1960s or early 1970s: a portrait of the artist as a young man.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |