When we last saw Duane Moore in Larry McMurtry’s 2007 novel When the Light Goes, he was a sixty-something malcontent who had just found age-old happiness with a much younger woman. When we first saw him back in 1966, in McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show, he was a sexually confused teenager living in a dying Texas town. In McMurtry’s latest Duane Moore-and-town- of-Thalia saga Rhino Ranch, our hero is still confused about women though he knows he likes them young. The more things change…

The fifth book in the series that began in 1966 with The Last Picture Show– and promised last–is more like the previous two than the first two. The Last Picture Show is a great American novel, a tale of aimless, small-town youth in a graying American lifestyle. The languid, now-pointless town of Thalia, is full of boys who are afraid of girls and happy to pursue a rancher’s blind heifer to satisfy their otherwise repressed sexual desires. In When the Light Goes Out, successful oil-patch man Duane Moore is told by a big-city psychiatrist and a lesbian to boot that he doesn’t understand women and relationships. Somehow it didn’t take three books to prove it. Thinking back, one has to feel even sorrier for the sightless heifer.

Thalia, dying in the first book and dying again after another oil boom thirty years later in Texasville, has become a joke in the last three installments. The Last Picture Show used the town to symbolize the erosion of small town life, pitting those who stay against those who wanted to leave. It’s still on life support, pulsed by a series of ironic gags: two Sri Lankans symbolize the globalization of small town life by taking over the corner convenience store and turning it into the Asia Wonder Deli, technology is seen as just the thing to re-invigorated the oil business, and the ranches have all been bought up by the rich and cut into “hunting leases.” The mistakes of the ubiquitous meth cookers make prairie fire a constant threat and the cemetery seems the most lively place in town. In the new volume, a billionairess intent on saving the black African rhinoceros, takes over a huge swath of ranchland to pursue her goals. What little life this pumps into the nearby town mostly breeds scorn and resentment. The strange opportunities and characters the rhino ranch brings seems to make Duane even more confused.

Duane’s always had good reason to be confused. Back in the 1960s, the high school beauty queen prick-teased him unmercifully. Years later, his much-loved wife is killed in an auto accident. His children behave strangely. He falls in love withy his therapist only to discover she’s a lesbian. His new, much-younger wife runs off with an Iranian playboy.

As in Duane’s Depressed and When the Light Goes, Duane casts around blankly, walking the Texas flatlands, spending time with his remaining friends and fishing out of sheer boredom. When the diagnosis comes, it’s not too deep to understand. “You’ve lost your sense of purpose,” the billionaire rhino rancher observes. Duane agrees.

Purpose, of course, means sex and Duane is enthused at its promise, first with an under-aged prostitute, secondly with a Thai secretary at his former oil company and lastly a much younger reporter who like to drink bourbon and do housecleaning. At his age, you’d think Duane is ready to retire. But McMurtry seems to have other ideas.

He’s enlivened this book with a few nice touches of the sort represented by the Asia Wonder Deli and the big-city shrink who takes an interest in our backwater hero. Here it comes in the form of ranch hands imported from South Africa, an old bushman hired to patrol the fence lines with nothing but a spear and an old and formidable rhino who appears to have supernatural abilities and, of course, takes a liking to Duane.

Much of the other fun in Rhino Ranch comes from the supporting cast. Bobby Lee Baxter, who admits  that he’s a “dick-driven” man, consumes  whiskey with Boyd Cotton, a man more interested in horses than women, as they stand watch with big-game worthy rifles over the eclectic herd. Duane’s single testicle son Dickie keeps thing lively at the Moore Oil Company by hiring that under-aged prostitute. The billionairess’ boyfriend, Hondo Honda, is a former Texas Ranger, who never goes anywhere, including the shower, without his rifle. Hondo is even more aimless than Duane. As Dickie notes, both Hondo and Duane have “become mere shadows of their former selves.”

The fatigue Duane’s story endures is reflected in the short-and-shorter chapters of Rhino Ranch. Few are over two pages long. Many are a page or less. These brief scenes make for quick and easy reading. But they also seem to represent the exhaustion McMurty’s storyline has suffered over three very similar books. Don’t get us wrong. We love Duane Moore and think he’s one of the great character inventions of the last 40 years. But his story ran its course two books back and we can’t help think that McMurty, as did John Updike with Rabbit Angstrom, should put him to rest.–Cabbage Rabbit

Reading Rhino Ranch, the latest installment in Larry McMurtry’s on-going Duane Moore saga that began in 1966 with The Last Picture Show, was a bit of deja-vu all over again. The last three books of the series are of a sort. The town of Thalia is still dying. Sexual frustration continues into old and older age.  Duane again suffers from malaise (indeed, the third installment of this five-part saga is entitled Duane’s Depressed). The Rabbit, who felt as if he were writing the same review twice, wonders if McMurtry could have melded the last three books and their ever-shrinking chapters into one grand book.  In the interest of letting readers determine this themselves, we offer our previous review of When the Light Goes, first published in the Inland Empire Weekly. Look for the Rhino Ranch review here. Our down-the-hole conclusion? Duane Moore is no Rabbit Angstrom. While both men are great American fictional characters, Updike’s Rabbit makes every appearance count. With Duane, it’s the same old themes revisited.–Cabbage Rabbit

Gray Sex

Senior citizen goes stiff in Larry McMurtry’s new novel

Even fictional men get old. But do they learn anything? We first met Duane Moore over 40 years ago in The Last Picture Show, the landmark novel of small-town decay by the prolific Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove, Terms Of Endearment and the screenplay of Annie Proulx’s short story Brokeback Mountain). Duane was a sexually frustrated high school senior who lived on his own in the local hotel and worked nights as an oil roughneck (the 1971 movie adaptation featured Jeff Bridges as Duane and Cybill Shepherd in her first film as the object of Duane’s frustration). In McMurtry’s latest book, When The Light Goes, Duane is a 64-year-old eccentric who owns a small oil company and travels rural Texas by bicycle. The sexual frustration remains.

Small town sexual repression was first among many themes in The Last Picture Show. Its characters included the macho football coach with closeted homosexual desires, his frustrated wife who awkwardly seduces Duane’s best friend Sonny, curious high school girls and their desperately horny male classmates (who can forget the great scene in which a pack of boys heads out to the ranch to gang rape a blind heifer?). In When the Light Goes, most everyone’s over their ignorance if not their frustration. Duane still suffers it, as does his son Bobbie Lee who has only one ball.

The Last Picture Show turned a flashlight on the hidden shadows of desire. When The Light Goes hits it with a flood lamp and sends up flares. The words “stiffening nipples” peeks from the book’s first sentence and becomes a reoccurring motif. If you think sex let alone wet dreams are over by 60, this book will be a revelation. What can we say but “Ewwwwww!”

Duane has just returned from Egypt and isn’t at all anxious to plunge into his former life. In the series’ previous book, Duane’s Depressed, our hero has taken to living in a cabin after the death of his wife in an auto accident. He ditches his truck to walk and bicycle, even to the neighboring city. On his return from Egypt, a sense of duty obliges him to stop in the oil company office where he spots those stiffening nipples. The story proceeds from there.

The people who worry about Duane’s mental state are as weird and troubled as he is though nonchalant about it all, their lives a playground of wide, comic swings. His daughter Julie, after confessing to her father that she’s slept with a “zillion” men, admits her husband Goober is gay and that she’s committed to becoming a nun. Son Bobby doesn’t want to shoot the parolee his wife has taken up with because he’s such a bad shot. (Bobby once tried to kill a bug with a pistol and instead blew off his little toe.) Duane has a crush on his analyst–shades of Tony Soprano!– a lesbian who quits her practice to deal raunchily with Duane’s hang-ups and her own grief. His 90-year-old employee Ruth Popper, once the frustrated coach’s wife who seduced Duane’s buddy Sonny, likes to brag about her sexual escapades with the Methodist minister. “There’s nothing like screwing a preacher,” she asserts. If you think life in sleepy little towns is predictably boring, this book might change your mind.

The suffocation of small towns was the other prominent theme of The Last Picture Show. Thalia, the Texas town in question, has been on the croak for four books and is now off life support and barely breathing. The only encouraging sign comes from the crossroads convenience store recently purchased by two Sri Lankan brothers who do away with microwave burritos and instead serve fresh shrimp dumplings and spring rolls to the oilboys.

Thalia’s ongoing death is only backdrop here. The book’s preoccupation is sex and how its serves as a key to Duane’s mental health. It’s decided that Duane, despite lovers, a forty year marriage and two daughters, is weak with women. Enter those stiff nipples, as sported by geological analyst Anne Cameron who’s been hired to bring new life to Moore’s drilling business (we’re not sure McMurtry meant the pun). Anne is younger than Duane’s daughters and her nipples become an obsession.

While Anne talks a good game she’s not much of a player. The story evolves as Duane and his paramour develop a physical relationship in spite of heart disease and a repulsion to tongue kissing. When the Light Goes is full of laughs and unruly characters. But it’s one-dimensional entertainment compared to the multi-dimensional The Last Picture Show. Maybe McMurtry just can’t get it up like he used to. Still, there’s no doubt  what’s on his mind.

WHEN THE LIGHT GOES By Larry McMurtry; Simon & Schuster, hardback, 195 pages, $24,; paperback, $14