Reading Order
Texasville Reading Order
Texasville (1987) by Larry McMurtry is the sequel to The Last Picture Show — set in Anarene, Texas, in 1987, thirty-five years after the events of the original novel. Sonny Crawford and Duane Moore are now in their early 50s: Sonny runs a convenience store and is beginning to show signs of mental deterioration (he occasionally has conversations with people who aren't there), and Duane has become a millionaire during the oil boom of the 1980s and is now broke as oil prices collapse. Jacy Farrow, the great beauty of the original novel, has returned to Anarene after a European career as a minor film actress — still beautiful, still devastating, still the center of attention in a town that cannot stop looking at her. Texasville is a broader, funnier, and more chaotic novel than The Last Picture Show — the deadpan satirical portrait of a small Texas town in the 1980s, beset by oil bust economics, public centennial celebrations, and the general sense that nothing is as serious as it was in 1951 when the movie theater closed. Where The Last Picture Show is an elegy, Texasville is a comedy, and the comedy is partly at the expense of how much duller the 1980s are than the 1950s, how the characters who seemed to be living out a tragedy now seem to be living out a farce. The novel was adapted into a 1990 film by Peter Bogdanovich reuniting most of the original cast.
Where to start
The Last Picture Show first, then Texasville. The sequel assumes familiarity with the original and with the characters' histories; without that context, the comedy of seeing them in middle age is diminished. Any Simon & Schuster or Touchstone paperback of Texasville.
Complete Texasville Book List
- 1Buy
The Last Picture Show
Larry McMurtry·1966·The essential predecessor — Sonny and Duane's senior year in Anarene, Texas; Sam the Lion, Jacy Farrow, the movie theater closing; all of Texasville's comedy depends on knowing how the characters' lives began. - 2Buy
Texasville
Larry McMurtry·1987·The novel — Sonny and Duane in their 50s; the oil boom, oil bust, the centennial celebrations; Jacy Farrow's return; the 1980s Anarene as comedy where the 1950s Anarene was tragedy. - 3Buy
Duane's Depressed
Larry McMurtry·1999·The third in the Thalia trilogy — Duane at 62, walking everywhere and reading Proust; the final installment of the Anarene/Thalia story, following the same characters into old age. - 4Buy
When the Last Leaf Falls
Larry McMurtry·2001·McMurtry's fourth Thalia novel (published as Thalia) — Duane in his later years; the continuation of the Anarene world for readers who want the full arc of McMurtry's Texas community across time. - 5Buy
Lonesome Dove
Larry McMurtry·1985·McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece — the companion in his Texas fiction; the frontier Texas of Lonesome Dove is the opposite pole from the contemporary small-town Texas of the Anarene/Thalia novels. - 6Buy
Terms of Endearment
Larry McMurtry·1975·McMurtry's mother-daughter novel — the companion in his domestic fiction; Aurora Greenway's Houston world is the urban, domestic counterpart to the small-town Texas of the Anarene novels. - 7Buy
A Confederacy of Dunces
John Kennedy Toole·1980·Toole's posthumous comic masterpiece — Ignatius J. Reilly in New Orleans is the Southern grotesque comic character equivalent to Texasville's middle-aged Texans muddling through the 1980s. - 8Buy
The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow·1953·Bellow's picaresque about a young Chicagoan going his own way — the companion in American fiction about a man who refuses to be defined by the world around him; Augie's mobility is the literary version of what Duane's restlessness represents in the Anarene novels.
Texasville — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Texasville about?
Texasville is set in Anarene (here called Thalia), Texas, in 1987 — thirty-five years after The Last Picture Show. Duane Moore, who was a young cowhand in the original novel, has become a millionaire during the Texas oil boom and is now going broke as oil prices collapse; he is deeply in debt, married to Karla with a houseful of difficult adult children, and having an affair. Sonny Crawford, Duane's best friend in the original novel, now runs a convenience store and is beginning to show signs of cognitive deterioration — he occasionally speaks to people who aren't there. Jacy Farrow, the great beauty of The Last Picture Show, has returned from Europe, where she has had a minor career as a film actress, and her arrival in Thalia reactivates all the old feelings and competitions from 1951.
Do I need to read The Last Picture Show before Texasville?
Yes — Texasville is built on the assumption that the reader knows The Last Picture Show thoroughly. Most of Texasville's comedy and pathos depend on the gap between the characters' 1951 lives (when everything felt tragic, mythic, and important) and their 1987 lives (when everything is chaotic, comedic, and deflated). The novel takes for granted that you know who Jacy is and what she meant in 1951, who Sam the Lion was, what the closing of the movie theater represented, and what Sonny and Duane were to each other as teenagers. Without that context, Texasville is a moderately entertaining comic novel about middle-aged Texans; with it, it is a genuinely funny and melancholy portrait of what happens to characters who lived as if their early lives were a myth and then had to go on living.
How does Texasville compare to The Last Picture Show?
The Last Picture Show is an elegy — dark, spare, and genuinely tragic in its portrait of a community's dissolution. Texasville is a comedy — broad, chaotic, and satirical in its portrait of the same community thirty-five years later. The tonal shift is deliberate and pointed: McMurtry seems to be suggesting that the 1950s were at least serious (the tragedy of the original novel had a genuine tragic dimension), while the 1980s are not (everything in Texasville is too chaotic and too obviously ridiculous to be tragic). The comedy has a melancholy underneath it — Sonny's mental deterioration, Duane's sense that his life has amounted to less than he expected — but Texasville does not have the concentrated grief of The Last Picture Show.
What is the Thalia trilogy?
The Thalia trilogy consists of The Last Picture Show (1966), Texasville (1987), and Duane's Depressed (1999), all set in the fictional town of Thalia, Texas (called Anarene in the original novel). The trilogy follows Sonny Crawford and Duane Moore from their senior year of high school in 1951 through their middle age in the 1980s and into their early old age at the end of the century. A fourth novel, When the Last Leaf Falls (2001), continues the story. The trilogy is unusual in American fiction in following the same small-town characters across five decades, allowing readers to see what happens to the people who were shaped by the specific world The Last Picture Show portrays.
What should I read after Texasville?
After Texasville, Duane's Depressed (1999) is the direct sequel in the Thalia trilogy. For McMurtry's other major work, Lonesome Dove is the masterpiece and Terms of Endearment is the companion in his domestic fiction. For comic American novels in a similar register, John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces and Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers are important companions in the tradition of American small-town comic fiction.
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