Recommendations
Books Like Texasville by Larry McMurtry
For readers of the great small-town Texas comeback
If you loved Texasville — Sonny and Duane in their 50s in a dying Texas town, Jacy Farrow's return, the oil bust comedy of 1987 Thalia — these novels share the same territory: small-town Americans in middle age, the comedy of lives that have become very different from what was imagined, and the specific humor of the American heartland under economic pressure.
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Buy on AmazonThe Last Picture Show
by Larry McMurtry
McMurtry's original — the essential predecessor; all of Texasville's comedy and sadness depends on knowing The Last Picture Show; Sonny and Duane as teenagers, Sam the Lion's death, the movie theater closing.
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Buy on AmazonDuane's Depressed
by Larry McMurtry
McMurtry's third Thalia novel — the direct sequel to Texasville; Duane in his 60s, parking his truck and walking everywhere and reading Proust; the essential continuation of the Thalia story.
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Buy on AmazonLonesome Dove
by Larry McMurtry
McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece — the companion in his full range; the frontier Texas epic is the opposite pole from Texasville's contemporary small-town mode, showing the breadth of McMurtry's Texas world.
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Buy on AmazonThe Leftovers
by Tom Perrotta
Perrotta's novel about a suburban New Jersey town after a rapture-like disappearance — the contemporary companion in American fiction about a community struggling to function after something has fundamentally changed; Mapleton's chaos is the paranoid, fantastical version of Thalia's oil-bust chaos.
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Buy on AmazonLake Wobegon Days
by Garrison Keillor
Keillor's novel-in-stories about the Minnesota town of Lake Wobegon — the companion in the tradition of American small-town fiction treated with affectionate comedy; Lake Wobegon's Lutherans and their quiet absurdity are the Midwestern version of Thalia's Texans.
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Buy on AmazonA Confederacy of Dunces
by John Kennedy Toole
Toole's posthumous comic masterpiece — the Southern grotesque companion in comic American fiction; Ignatius J. Reilly in New Orleans is the most famous example of the Southern/Western American character whose personality exceeds every situation he enters, as Duane and Sonny's lives exceed Thalia.
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Buy on AmazonMain Street
by Sinclair Lewis
Lewis's great small-town novel — the companion in the American tradition of the small-town-as-trap; Carol Kennicott's Gopher Prairie is the Midwestern, early-20th-century version of what Texasville is doing in the Texas, late-20th-century mode.
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Buy on AmazonThe Ice Storm
by Rick Moody
Moody's novel about two Connecticut families during a 1973 Thanksgiving ice storm — the companion in American fiction about suburban American life in the 1970s and the quiet desperation underneath; the New Canaan families' dysfunction is the Northeast version of Thalia's Texas disorder.
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