REVIEW: Western Star: The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry by David Streitfeld

Reviewed by Christy Moore

In his new book Western Star: The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry, David Streitfeld quotes Julie Solchek, a young woman who moved from Tucson to Texas to work in McMurtry’s Archer City bookstore. Solchek said she made the move to the town McMurtry portrayed as small minded and dying in The Last Picture Show because McMurtry made her laugh. “He had all the gossip about everyone,” she said, “from Henry James to Christopher Hitchins.”

I suspect that McMurtry’s gift for gossip is one of the things David Streitfeld liked about him, too. The two men were friends, bonded through their mutual love of books among other things, and Streitfeld approaches his story of McMurtry like a friend who knows something about his subject from the man himself. When he can, Streitfeld separates the tall tales, unfounded rumors, and exaggerations from the actual truth, fact-checking and comparing the official versions (often McMurtry’s version) to the verifiable facts.

For instance, Streitfeld fleshes out Tom Wolfe’s meager account, in the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, of the day in 1964 when Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters stopped their bus at McMurtry’s house in Houston. In his version, Wolfe does not bother to give a name (other than her prankster alias, Stark Naked) to the naked woman who jumped from the bus and scooped up Larry McMurtry’s two-year-old son where he was playing in the front yard.

Streitfeld corrects the record by learning her name (Cathryn Casamo), contacting her, and allowing her to give her sad side of the story which involved drug-induced delusions, incarceration, and a stay in a mental hospital that sounds like a chapter from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Streitfeld’s corrections belie the dismissive chauvinism of Wolfe’s telling and paint McMurtry, who bailed her out of the psychiatric ward after the Merry Pranksters left town, as the only person involved in the whole episode with an empathetic muscle. Streitfeld excels at putting meat on the bones of gossip-worthy moments like that.

The book opens with a chapter about McMurtry’s cowboy and pioneer ancestors and exposes threads in McMurtry family stories of bushwhackers, Commanches, and the vicissitudes of settling the wilderness that informed Larry McMurtry’s world view and his fiction. From that pre-history, Streitfeld traces similar influences in chronological order – learning to work from a workaholic ranching father, growing up in a bookless town, attending North Texas State as an undergraduate and graduate school at Rice and Stanford, first marriage, etc. But this is not a straight biography, and Streitfeld makes no pretense of covering it all (which Tracy Daugherty has already attempted with some success in his 2023 biography of McMurtry). Instead, he lingers longer on some episodes than others. Most prominently, Streitfeld devotes multiple chapters each to three McMurtry works that became groundbreaking films: The Last Picture Show, Lonesome Dove, and Brokeback Mountain.

The first chapter about The Last Picture Show explores the circumstances and influences that prompted McMurtry to write such a scathing indictment of his hometown and the town’s embittered reception of the book. The other two chapters focus on the making of the movie, McMurtry’s friendship with the director, Peter Bogdanovich, the critical response to the movie, and the impact it had on the careers and personal lives of the people involved.

I am probably the best and worst audience for this book. By the time Peter Bogdanovich brought his film crew to Archer City in 1970, fell in love with Cybil Shepherd, and wrecked his marriage, I was already an admirer and avid reader of Larry McMurtry. Although Streitfeld doesn’t cover a lot of new territory for me, I am happy to soak up new takes on McMurtry and rehash old ones.

Streitfeld’s attention to details allows him to tease out some interesting analyses. For example, it was Peter Bogdanovich’s cinephilic view that the closing of the movie theatre in McMurtry’s fictionalized hometown was symbolic of something bigger: the death of culture in that place. Drawing a connection between that perspective and McMurtry’s oft-repeated observation that he grew up in a bookless house in a bookless town, Streitfeld develops the point further, suggesting that in a town where no one reads, the movies are the only connection to culture. Though that was not the conscious, driving force for The Last Picture Show when McMurtry wrote it, I find the argument provocative and wonder about its possible relevance to the rural/urban divide that has mushroomed in the decades since the 1950s when the theatre closed. Streitfeld’s analysis illustrates the likelihood that McMurtry was uniquely tapped into something in the cultural zeitgeist that is still revealing itself.

Though I enjoy the deeper look at the three books-become-films, the digressions sometimes eclipse Larry McMurtry himself. Streitfeld digs into McMurtry’s relationships, especially with women, giving enough information to make me wonder, like a hungry gossip, about the nature of those relationships, but not enough for me to understand them. I come away from the book with a better understanding of Peter Bogdanovich and Polly Platt’s marriage and divorce than I have of Larry and Jo McMurtry’s. Streitfeld is equally vague about other personal details of McMurtry’s life, like his second marriage to Faye Kesey or his battle with depression.

All this points to why I’m the worst audience for this book. Admittedly, I may be bringing hero-worship to the table. But, I’m not looking for eulogy or more biographical detail. I’m not even looking for more gossip. Still, I am looking for something more. And perhaps Streitfeld is, too. In the final chapter of the book, he writes “In the last 20 years of [McMurtry’s] life, at a time when there should have been books celebrating his accomplishments and charting his influence, there was almost nothing.”

Here we have one of the most prolific writers of the last 100 years, an intellectual powerhouse and Pulitzer Prize winner whose literary merit has been challenged from the beginning because he was not an east-coast intellectual or a west-coast trendsetter. I agree with Streitfeld that it’s past time for scholarship on McMurtry that probes questions about his literary merit, for good or bad, and his cultural footprint. Is he just a minor regional novelist as the slogan on a sweatshirt he used to wear proclaimed? Did he breathe more life and authenticity into his female characters than other male writers of his generation, as many of his admirers claim?  Did he reshape our perception of the American west or just perpetuate our myths?

It’s not Streitfeld’s mission to tackle that kind of scholarship. He has, however, laid the groundwork for deeper analysis by hinting at these questions and the iceberg beneath them and by demonstrating that discussion of McMurtry’s literary merit is going to be complicated and enriched by a discussion of films that were made from his novels.

Ultimately, the book Streitfeld has written is an entertaining and affectionate, though unsentimental, examination of a complicated writer with a complicated career.