| Duane's Depressed (Last Picture Show Trilogy) | 
 enlarge | Author: Larry Mcmurtry
Publisher: Pocket
Category: Book
List Price: $7.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:   (63 reviews)
Sales Rank: 810101
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 528
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 6.8 x 4.2 x 1.2
ISBN: 0671025570
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780671025571
ASIN: 0671025570
Publication Date: September 1, 1999
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
At 62, ever-dependable oil man Duane Moore ditches his pickup and starts walking everywhere--deeply deviant behavior in one-stoplight Thalia, Texas. "It occurred to him one day--not in a flash, but through a process of seepage, a kind of gas leak into his consciousness--that most of his memories, from his first courtship to the lip of old age, involved the cabs of pickups," Larry McMurtry writes. Yet oddly enough, Duane's marriage, four children and nine grandchildren, his career highs and lows, all occurred when he was nowhere near his vehicle. Within days he has moved into his cabin on a hill, reacquired his dog, Shorty the Sixth ("an air of slight guilt was typical of all the Shortys"), and begun to think on these things. Of course, this brings on an additional problem: "He realized that for the first time in his life he had too much time to think; of course he had wanted more time to think, but that was probably because he hadn't realized how tricky thinking could be." Luckily for readers, Duane's attempts to go off the grid are far from successful. Thus do we have the deep pleasures of his comical and complex encounters with his wife, Karla, and family, not to mention some of Thalia's singular citizens. As ever, McMurtry's dialogue and narration snaps and surprises. He makes his hero's solitude, and his increasing depression, infinitely intriguing. Will Duane's attempts to literally and figuratively cultivate his garden succeed? Will he forge his way through the three volumes of Proust that his attractive new psychiatrist has prescribed in lieu of Prozac? Will the catfish that has found its way into his waterbed survive? Answers to these and many other questions await you in Duane's Depressed, the final book of the marvelous trilogy McMurtry began with The Last Picture Show and Texasville. Let us pray that it turns into a quartet: we need far more of Duane and his family. For a start, his granddaughter Barbi--"a dark midge of a child"--merits a volume of her own. --Kerry Fried
Product Description
Larry McMurtry's "funny and brutal" (New York Times) landmark novel The Last Picture Show introduced the shrinking oil-patch town of Thalia, Texas, and its teenaged residents Duane, Sonny, and Jacy. In Texasville, the trio grew up to "adultery and madness, bankruptcy and boom times," (New York Daily News). Now McMurtry takes his most colorful characters into their twilight years -- in an unforgettable end to the Thalia saga. Surrounded by his children, all of whom are going through tumultuous transitional times; his promiscuous wife, Karla, who is with her own demons; and his friend Sonny, who seems to be dying, Duane can't make sense of his life anymore. The stark realization that he has spent his whole life in a miserable dust-bowl town throws him into a protracted end-of-life crisis -- one that will hurtle him toward unexpected love, profoundly affect old friends, and cause him to embark on outlandish new beginning. McMurtry's strongest and most appealing contemporary novel since Terms of Endearment, Duane's Depressed is utterly unsentimental, often hilarious, sometimes tragic and shocking, and in the end full of hope.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 58 more reviews...
In Search Of Lost Time September 10, 2008
In the blink of an eye it seems we can go in this The Last Picture Show trilogy from a coming of age story in the Last Picture Show to a mid-life crisis story in Texasville to the struggle against mortality during old age story here. Or maybe it is just changing from one book to another. Ya, right? There may be a space of thirty years between the action in The Last Picture Show and Texasville and another fourteen between Texasville and Duane's Depressed but it hardly a blink of the eye. It takes effort to build up to the mid-life crisis (or better crises) and then apply those lessons to the struggle against mortality that form the central idea of this novel as those of the generation of '68 and older are painfully aware. But so be it.
By one of life's little quirks this reviewer is the same age as Duane in this phase of his life's story, 62. Therefore the reviewer can sympathize, understand and relate to the struggle against the vicissitudes of morality that, in the final analysis, Duane is struggling against. Duane's whole life has been consumed by the notion of duty, doing the right thing and keeping his own counsel to the exclusion of having any close personal relationships, including with his wife Karla. One day he decides, rightly by this reviewer's lights, to chuck his old life, at least the symbols of it. The tale told here revolves around that break out, the separate lost of his dear wife Karla in fatal automobile accident and his struggle to find a new place in his world without her. Along the way Jacy and Sonny the companions of his youth also pass from the scene. In an odd sense he is the last one standing.
Needless to say all of this introspection is going to take a lot out of a very stoic man like Duane. Moreover, a review of his whole life means a look at lots of things that are not obvious. Probably the best little literary trick that McMurtry uses here is to link Duane up with a sexually unattainable woman psychiatrist who recommends reading Marcel Proust's Remembrances of Things Past as a form of discovery. This is a monumental work that has baffled more than one intellectual as to its meaning. Hell, on reflection, it probably baffled Proust. The trick is that Duane actually struggled to read it overt the course of a year. I suggest that the alternate translation of Proust's book is more appropriate to what Duane was looking for-In Search Of Lost Time. That, my friends, is what we all face as we face mortality. If you are going to read Larry McMurtry read this trilogy. That's the ticket.
 Please read this book!! April 13, 2006
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book hit me straight in the heart. I got so wrapped up in this book, that I couldn't put it down. I did not read the first two of the trilogy, I wasn't aware that is was a trilogy when I bought it. It is not that important. The way that Duane was depicted in this book was amazing. I felt as if I really identified with him. I recommend it to anyone whose heart is searching.
Reflections on Duane's Depressed by Larry McMurtry September 28, 2005
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book is a sequel to Texasville which is a sequel to The Last Picture Show. I have read both of the latter books and have seen the movies for each one. One should probably see the two movies before reading the third book in the series. Some characters are the same in all the books and McMurtry mentions other characters in the earlier books that have gone on to other lives and deaths in this latest novel.
I related to this latest one in the series because it is written from Duane's point of view and he is exactly my age for the period of the book. While I am not exactly from the part of Texas where the book is set, I have been through there many times and know the area. Whereas I thought, from the opening lines of the book, that it might somehow deal directly with the issues of sustainability and more simple living, I did not find any of the catch phrases of this movement in the book. There is however, much indirect evidence that McMurtry was thinking along these lines as Duane parked his pickup, hid the keys and started to walk everywhere from then on. Duane's shrink convinced him to get a bicycle, but he was never in a motorized vehicle during this entire book. Seeing the countryside as a pedestrian or a bicyclist brought out the environmentalist in Duane. Reading this book gives one a clue to the challenges that one would have in promoting Sustainability and Simplicity in that part of the world. Issues of family and extended family are dramatized, and while the children and grandchildren are treated in a positive way at the end, in the beginning of the book, the opposite is true.
The book deals with Duane's retirement and his mixed feelings about what he has accomplished in 62 years. I certainly identify with this dilemma. I believe that McMurtry developed some heart problems around the time of his publishing this book and subsequently had successful bypass surgery. In this story, he ironically, perhaps wishfully endows Duane with low blood pressure, low cholesterol and low PSA scores. In a subsequent non-fiction book, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, McMurtry discusses this brush with mortality. He also gives a history of his family in this part of Texas and his growing up in Archer City where he has built a library to house his huge book collection, many of which he discusses in Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. If one is looking for a bibliography of books that one "should" read, this is it, in my opinion.
What I like about McMurtry's characters is that most are not criminals, sociopaths and dysfunctionals. Most are just trying to get along in life. True he does cover the colorful characters of the west such a Billy the Kid and Calamity Jane, among others. He uses dialogue very skillfully to tell the stories, especially in the earlier parts of a book. In a couple of books, he seems to have grown weary and resorts to a straight narrative in the latter portions in order to fill in gaps and describe what happens to certain characters.
Excellent novel September 19, 2005
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
This is the third volume in the trilogy which includes THE LAST PICTURE SHOW and TEXASVILLE.
Set in Thalia, Texas, once again, Duane Moore, now 62, is beginning to feel his age and mileage. He's tired of the rat race that seems to permeate his life, so he leaves his wife and home and takes up residence in a nearby cabin. He gives up driving and walks (then bicycles) everywhere, sometimes over great distances. He builds a huge garden in which he grows just about every foodstuff imaginable, cares for it religiously 10 hours a day, and gives all the food away to the poor who come for it. He begins going to a psychiatrist in Wichita Falls who tells him to read all of Proust, which he struggles through. (Proust is McMurtry's favorite writer.) Finally, he flies off alone to Egypt.
This novel is a major achievement for McMurtry, a big step up from TEXASVILLE in the trilogy. He is much more focused on his characters, and his insights are more penetrating. Some of the things he has Duane do in his search for redemption and meaning in life are outlandish (as only McMurtry could be), but he pulls them off convincingly (even when we begin to doubt the believability of things). Top-drawer McMurtry and a pleasure to read.
Stick With It May 19, 2005
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
One of my favorite books that I read in my teens was "The Last Picture Show" by Larry McMurtry. (It was a pretty good movie as well). It really turned me on to this then-promising young author. When the sequel, "Texasville", came out years later, I read that as well. It turned out to be one of the worst books I have read. McMurtry's style of writing changed after his heart attack and his writing really suffered since shortly after "Lonesome Dove" came out. Still, I found myself continuing to read most every book of his that came out and wanting to be there when the old McMurtry showed up again.
After my experience with "Texasville", I bought, but was reluctant to read, "Duane's Depressed; the sequel to "Texasville". As I started out with the book I thought to myself, "This is what's wrong with the post-angina McMurtry". The problem is the excessive abundance of boringly idiotic characters. They're like an influx simplistic and Americanized people out of a Fellini movie. What made me almost put the book down and quit it is the multitude of Duane's children and grandchildren who are nothing but out of control spoiled brats. If this was the only book that I encountered these type of characters, I wouldn't mind. However, they overflow in all of the modern McMurtry.
As I struggled through a cast of totally disinteresting characters, I reached a point (at about a fourth of the way into the book) where the book really started to take off. We lose the dysfunctional offspring and start focussing on Duane Moore. His is a character well-developed by an author that was showing he's still got it. I found myself drawn into Duane and his life and challenges. I found myself relating to a man who was facing many things similar to what I was dealing with in my life. For the duration of the book, I couldn't wait to find out what happened next. It was a truly endearing study of a man bewildered by his past, present and future. As Duane was struggling with his issues, I found myself wondering if McMurtry was being autobiographical. I know next to nothing about his private life. It wasn't until his 14th or 15th book that a picture of him was shown on any dust jacket and that's the same picture that has appeared on every book since. Maybe it's an analogy of how his life changed after his heart attack. Whatever it was, the character of Duane takes me back to the early talent of Larry McMurtry.
This is a very good book that just happens to start out poorly. It isn't up there with "The Last Picture Show", "Lonesome Dove", "Leaving Cheyenne", or "Horseman Pass By". However, it IS in the category of "Moving On", "All My Friends are Going to be Strangers", "Terms of Endearment" and several others. When McMurtry's good he is VERY good but when he is bad...
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