Amazon.com
At 62, ever-dependable oil man Duane Moore ditches his pickup and starts walking everywhere--deeply deviant behavior in one-stoplight Thalia, Texas. "It occurred to him one day--not in a flash, but through a process of seepage, a kind of gas leak into his consciousness--that most of his memories, from his first courtship to the lip of old age, involved the cabs of pickups," Larry McMurtry writes. Yet oddly enough, Duane's marriage, four children and nine grandchildren, his career highs and lows, all occurred when he was nowhere near his vehicle. Within days he has moved into his cabin on a hill, reacquired his dog, Shorty the Sixth ("an air of slight guilt was typical of all the Shortys"), and begun to think on these things. Of course, this brings on an additional problem: "He realized that for the first time in his life he had too much time to think; of course he had wanted more time to think, but that was probably because he hadn't realized how tricky thinking could be."
Luckily for readers, Duane's attempts to go off the grid are far from successful. Thus do we have the deep pleasures of his comical and complex encounters with his wife, Karla, and family, not to mention some of Thalia's singular citizens. As ever, McMurtry's dialogue and narration snaps and surprises. He makes his hero's solitude, and his increasing depression, infinitely intriguing. Will Duane's attempts to literally and figuratively cultivate his garden succeed? Will he forge his way through the three volumes of Proust that his attractive new psychiatrist has prescribed in lieu of Prozac? Will the catfish that has found its way into his waterbed survive? Answers to these and many other questions await you in Duane's Depressed, the final book of the marvelous trilogy McMurtry began with The Last Picture Show and Texasville. Let us pray that it turns into a quartet: we need far more of Duane and his family. For a start, his granddaughter Barbi--"a dark midge of a child"--merits a volume of her own. --Kerry Fried
From Publishers Weekly
Pulitzer Prize-winning author McMurtry (Lonesome Dove) offers the final volume in the trilogy that includes the memorable The Last Picture Show (1966) and Texasville (1987). Drawing inspiration from the small Texas town where he grew up, McMurtry limns a wryly comic and finely nuanced portrayal of oil-rich Duane Moore, 62, a leading citizen of small-town Thalia. Depressed for no obvious reason, Duane vexes and bewilders family and community alike when he suddenly parks his identity-defining pickup truck in his carport and starts hoofing it everywhere. His wife, Karla, their adult kids and the small mob of humorously foul-mouthed grandchildren living under his roof grow more confused as his unsettling behavior escalates, especially when he moves to a crude shack six miles out of town. After he turns the family oil business over to eldest son Dickie (newly out of an Arizona drug-rehab center), the delicate symbiosis of the eccentric little town threatens to break down. Duane's symptoms intensify as he consults a comely psychiatrist in Wichita Falls and buys a fancy bicycle. Sudden tragedy disrupts the hero's therapy just as he is starting to come out of his yearlong deep freeze and, with regret and befuddlement, take a long look at his life. Using barren landscapes and drab interiors to emphasize the subtle, potent drama of Duane's search for himself, McMurtry shines as he examines the issues of alienation, grief and the confrontation with personal mortality. Despite a curious distance imposed by limiting the third-person narration almost exclusively to Duane?which at times renders the voice essentially journalistic?this novel represents McMurtry at the top of his form. Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club featured alternates. (Jan.) FYI: Scribner is reissuing The Last Picture Show and Texasville in trade paper editions to honor completion of the Thalia trilogy.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
McMurtry is in fine form in this conclusion to a trilogy that began with The Last Picture Show (1966) and continued in Texasville (LJ 4/1/87). Now in his early sixties, Duane Moore is in the midst of a mid-life crisis. He first decides to do without a car and starts walking everywhere?a real shocker in Thalia, TX, where the notion of getting anywhere by foot is laughable. Duane also leaves home and moves to a one-room cabin and then proceeds to pretty much wash his hands of his (totally) dysfunctional adult children and their children. Karla, Duane's long-suffering wife, suspects that he is having an affair. Since Duane is as bewildered by what's happening to him as everyone else is, he finally agrees to see a psychiatrist. (His experiences with the psychiatrist include falling in love with her, reading Proust, and, in an extremely funny scene, attending a book discussion group.) McMurtry's characters are rendered lovingly, if outlandishly, and the pleasure of his easygoing style more than makes up for a plot that really doesn't hold together for a minute. The ending feels rushed, a shame because most of us wouldn't mind reading another hundred pages or so of this entertaining novel. Recommended for all public libraries.-?Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, SeattleCopyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The New York Times Book Review, Robert Houston
Duane's Depressed is a worthy end to an important trilogy, one that captures vividly and movingly nearly half a century of life in a great swath of America.
The Wall Street Journal, Bob Hughes
...Mr. McMurtry's touch is always light and humorous, even when dispensing sharp insights into the crises of middle age.
The New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
We have come a long way from the novel's slapstick opening to its nearly sentimental conclusion. But thanks to McMurtry's sure touch, there isn't the least sense of disappointment.
From Kirkus Reviews
Likable characters, wry dialogue, and a bittersweet sense of time passing and opportunities lost are the engaging features of this amiable follow-up (and the conclusion of a trilogy) to McMurtry's The Last Picture Show (1966) and Texasville (1987) . Once again, the storys set in and around the west Texas town of Thalia, where former high-school football hero and wealthy oilman Duane Moore is enduring, at the age of 62, a late midlife crisis. Forty years of marriage to his beloved, exasperating Karl a and a houseful of itinerant dysfunctional adult children and their smart-mouthed progeny have taken their toll: inexplicably one day, Duane abandons his pickup truck and begins a regimen of long, meditative walks (raising family speculations about his f idelity and sanity), and, in unconscious emulation of Thoreau, moves to a cabin conveniently distant from family obligations and pressures (``He had stepped out of the flow of ongoingness''). With one dramatic exception, little happensother than Duane's b emused scrutiny of his own ``depression,'' and encounters with such agreeably deranged friends and neighbors as his self-destructive employee Bobby Lee, nearsighted secretary Ruth Popper (Picture Show's unlikely femme fatale), and storekeeper Jody Carmich ael, WWII veteran and ``compulsive sports gambler.'' Duane does gather enough energy to rent the bridal suite at a deliciously seedy motel while undergoing psychotherapy with Jodys daughter, Dr. Honor Carmichael, with whom he falls absurdly in love, leadi ng to a yearlong struggle reading Proust and some climactic self-discoveries that don't surprise either Duane or us, but do precipitate a highly satisfying ending that reconciles him with Karla and enables Duane to finally indulge the pleasures he has lon g denied himself. There's a scarcity of story here, but McMurtry obviously enjoys these folks so much he can't resist hanging out with them for 400-plus pages. You probably won't be able to either. (Literary Guild alternate selection) -- Copyright &co py;1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
The Denver Post McMurtry's back in form....The novel is alternately funny, bittersweet and sad, a mix of emotions that McMurtry has all but patented.
Book Description
Larry McMurtry's "funny and brutal" (New York Times) landmark novel The Last Picture Show introduced the shrinking oil-patch town of Thalia, Texas, and its teenaged residents Duane, Sonny, and Jacy. In Texasville, the trio grew up to "adultery and madness, bankruptcy and boom times," (New York Daily News). Now McMurtry takes his most colorful characters into their twilight years -- in an unforgettable end to the Thalia saga. Surrounded by his children, all of whom are going through tumultuous transitional times; his promiscuous wife, Karla, who is with her own demons; and his friend Sonny, who seems to be dying, Duane can't make sense of his life anymore. The stark realization that he has spent his whole life in a miserable dust-bowl town throws him into a protracted end-of-life crisis -- one that will hurtle him toward unexpected love, profoundly affect old friends, and cause him to embark on outlandish new beginning. McMurtry's strongest and most appealing contemporary novel since Terms of Endearment, Duane's Depressed is utterly unsentimental, often hilarious, sometimes tragic and shocking, and in the end full of hope.
About the Author
The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, among other awards, Larry McMurtry is the author of twenty-two novels, including Lonesome Dove, Terms of Endearment, The Evening Star, Buffalo Girls, The Late Child, and Comanche Moon. He has also written two collections of essays, and more than thirty screenplays. Mr. McMurtry lives in Texas.
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