Yesterday I read Larry McMurtry’s Rhino Ranch, the final installment in the life of Duane Morris.  McMurtry first introduced Morris in 1966 in The Last Picture Show, along with other personalities (I am using the word deliberately) from Thalia, Texas.  In Rhino Ranch the good-byes to many of the characters are the final good-bye, with endings due to everything from to cancer to heart disease to meth addiction to car accidents and even to plain old age.

McMurtry writes like a cowboy lives, with little excess, lots of sky (space between the short chapters), and keeping things simple, straightforward, and focused.  A cowboy tends the herd, drawing strays back to safety and settling ornery bulls down to peace and quiet. McMurtry tends his flock of Thalia-ites, as far flung as they have become; he brings them back home, when necessary, calms them when they become sex-addled or money-crazed, and accounts for them all at the end of the day.   And as the cowboy has had to deal with a changing world, McMurtry has let the world of Texas and small-town Thalia change as well.  Gone are the herds, and in have come the hunting ranches; the oil boom has died but the drilling is still alive and kicking.  Immigrants cook up great Asian fast food but a chicken-fried steak can still be found, and at least for now, people are still lining up for it, along with cream and biscuits.

The Duane Morris saga is uniquely American. Its characters, the whole wide wacky breadth of them, could only be found in America, not only because of their optimism in the face of misery but also because of their bad taste in everything from T-shirts to architecture, their fervent anti-intellectualism (with one or two exceptions), and their sex lives (restrained by law, loosened by porn).  The landscape of the saga is also American to the core: the wide open spaces of Texas, where even a ten-ton rhino can hide himself forever, appearing often enough to keep the locals yammering and the press flies buzzing, but always with the option of disappearing back into the unknown.

McMurtry and his main man, Duane Morris, will never disappear into the unknown.  They are part of the American canon now, the work of a writer’s life setting out the life of a very real American man, just as Updike set out Rabbit; McMurtry lacks the subtlety, precision, and agony of an Updike, but he always offers up good reading and certain immersion into the small Texas town so many know so well.