Recommendations
Books Like Duane's Depressed by Larry McMurtry
For readers of the great late-McMurtry Proust comedy
If you loved Duane's Depressed — Duane walking everywhere instead of driving, reading Proust, seeing his psychiatrist Honor Carmichael, the specific sadness of a Texas man with nothing left to do — these novels share the same register: aging men reassessing their lives, the comedy and sadness of old age in small-town America, and the question of what literature can offer a man who never read before.
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Buy on AmazonThe Last Picture Show
by Larry McMurtry
McMurtry's original Thalia novel — the essential foundation; the Duane of Duane's Depressed is comprehensible only against the Duane of The Last Picture Show; seeing the same character at 17 and at 62 is the point.
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Buy on AmazonTexasville
by Larry McMurtry
The second Thalia novel — the essential intermediate step; the Duane of Texasville (chaotic, indebted, middle-aged) is the bridge between the Duane of The Last Picture Show and the Duane of Duane's Depressed.
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Buy on AmazonA Man Called Ove
by Fredrik Backman
Backman's bestselling novel about a cantankerous, suicidal old Swedish man whose community refuses to let him die alone — the international, comic companion to Duane's depression; both men are impossible on the surface and genuinely moved by what the world actually offers them when they stop resisting.
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Buy on AmazonStoner
by John Williams
Williams's quietly devastating novel about a Missouri English professor who finds meaning in literature and nowhere else — the companion in the tradition of American fiction about a man who discovers what reading can do; Stoner's quiet life and Duane's late-life Proust are both about what literature gives to men who come to it without credentials.
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Buy on AmazonThe Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro's Booker Prize-winning novel about a butler reviewing his life — the British, more lyrical companion in fiction about a man who is very late realizing what he missed; Stevens's repression and Duane's depression are both forms of the same belated reckoning.
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Buy on AmazonLonesome Dove
by Larry McMurtry
McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece — the essential companion in his Texas fiction; the Lonesome Dove world is the frontier ancestor to the Thalia world, and reading them together shows the full arc of McMurtry's portrait of Texas from the 1870s to the 1990s.
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Buy on AmazonIn Search of Lost Time
by Marcel Proust
The Proust that Duane is reading throughout the novel — Swann's Way (volume 1 in Lydia Davis's translation) is the specific text Honor Carmichael assigns; the gap between Proust's elaborate aristocratic world and Duane's small-town Texas world is the novel's central comic conceit.
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Buy on AmazonTerms of Endearment
by Larry McMurtry
McMurtry's companion in his domestic fiction — Aurora Greenway is the female version of McMurtry's portrait of a formidable personality at the end of a full life; Terms and the Thalia trilogy are the two pillars of his non-Western Texas fiction.
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