What Makes Fiction Worth the Bother?
Preaching the Gospel of Regional Writers
Larry McMurtry’s Moving On has one of my all-time favorite openings to a fictional world. Outside a Texas rodeo arena, Patsy Carpenter sits in a warm Ford eating a melted Hershey bar and reading Catch-22, when a beered-up cowboy unzips beside her car and pees on the front tire. I’ve been chuckling ever since. I love how McMurtry includes concession stand chocolate and serious literature in the same breath, how the beer-drinking behavior of the rodeo world intrudes into Patsy’s private experience. I’ve carried the surprise of this opening scene with me for five decades.
Fifteen years after Moving On arrived on bookshelves, Lonesome Dove moved McMurtry onto a much larger map. First came the Pulitzer, then the masterful miniseries. But years before all this, the movies had come knocking. McMurtry’s first novel, Horseman, Pass By (1961), might have faded into the obscurity that awaits so many regional writers. Except that two years later Hollywood turned it into Hud, starring Paul Newman at the peak of his career. And several years after that: The Last Picture Show, Peter Bogdanovich’s mood-drenched black-and-white adaptation of McMurtry’s third novel.
In my post of two weeks ago, I mentioned hearing decades back that McMurtry had a T-shirt saying simply, “Minor Regional Writer.” That word—regional—has been much on my mind lately. Here’s what I’m thinking. Yes, Lonesome Dove earned Larry McMurtry national, even international standing. But he was—first, last, always—a regional writer. What makes his fiction worth the bother is that the words, the sentences, the pages meticulously recreate the specifics of a region, a place, a rodeo parking lot.
The best writers locate us—in a provincial English ballroom with Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy, in Toni Morrison’s Not Doctor Street or Hemingway’s Italian field hospital or Chicago streets in winter as only Richard Wright could have known them.
We should all of us aspire to be regional writers. And not worry about words such as “minor.”