The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The Last Picture Show is a bleak novel about people struggling to navigate through their difficult lives in a dying Texas town during the Korean War. A sense of decay and hopelessness pervade everything in this book, with the town seemingly following the moral decay of its people–or is it the other way around? It’s never really clear.
I picked this up after seeing Peter Bogdanovich’s magnificent movie, which he and Larry McMurtry co-wrote the screenplay for. The book follows the movie closely, with dialog that’s very similar, but the novel is richer, filling out background details that the movie doesn’t touch on and also depicting extra scenes that, even today, would cross the line of what you could show on the screen. A couple of them just made me squirm. What the book lacks, though, is the movie’s brilliantly sparse economy, and given that McMurtry dips in and out of his character’s minds, the characters’ actions don’t surprise you and puzzle you in the novel like they sometimes do in the movie. As a consequence, they don’t get you to think about them as much.
I know this is a book review, and the novel has many fine points, but this really is one of just a handful of books I’ve read where I thought the movie was actually better. McMurtry’s writing style here is somewhat stiff and matter-of-fact throughout, and strangely, the movie seems to tease more emotion and meaning out of the material than the novel manages to.
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