Horseman, Pass By

This was McMurtry's first novel, and it feels like it. While it is a good story, it certainly doesn't rate with Last Picture Show or even Leaving Cheyenne. It does have the west Texas bleakness built into it, but it's not the book that you might expect from the buildup surrounding Hud. I first read it years ago and enjoyed more than this time, so it may also have something to do with the narrator. Just a bit too hang-dog, I guess.

Jimmy told me years ago that his uncle Jack and a number of his cronies reminded him of Hud, the same wild ass, amoral characters that seemed to populate West Texas. I guess that mom's cousin Vernon could go in that same mold: good lucking guys driven around by their dicks and general lack of scruples. But Hud wasn't nearly as unscrupulous as I remembered him from my first reading. Even his shooting of Homer makes sense in terms of relieving suffering. And then he's the one that makes Lonnie seem respectable at the church during the funeral.

The book is really about Homer and the way of life that is dying with him, the old cowboy who has worked the ranch for so long. He finally breaks under the pressure of the last catastrophe, in a life filled with catastrophes, and one that was brought on by his buying cattle on the cheap from Mexico. There is something to be said about Hud's negative judgement of Homer. It's just that we see Homer through Lonnie's worshipful eyes. And maybe it's really Lonnie's voice that I don't enjoy so much. McMurtry uses the first person narrator so seldom, and maybe there's a good reason for it.

Author: McMurtry, Larry

Date Published: 1961

Length: 7 hr 34 min

Narrator: McCue, Kevin

Cities of the Plains

The third book of Cormac McCarthy's border trilogy, Cities of the Plain brings together John Grady Cole from All the Pretty Horses and Billy Parham from The Crossing in an evocation of the dying cowboy way of life. Set in far west Texas, the Sodom and Gamorrah here is Ciudad Juarez, a town where the cowboys go to get drunk and to get laid. The books is more descriptive than narrative, overlaid with a sense of loss and of sadness. In west Texas of 1952, the cowboy way of life is almost completely dead. Those days are dead and gone, and yet the boys try to live on and make the best of it they can. But events are set in motion for tragedy when John Grady falls in love with the whore Magdalena. John Grady becomes a Christ figure who tries to redeem his little part of the world. And the epilogue stands all story telling traditions on their heads.

Author: McCarthy, Cormac

Published: 1998

Length: 8hr 46min

Narrator: Adams, Alexander