Product Description

In this masterful and often surprising sequel to the acclaimed Duane's Depressed, the Pulitzer Prize- and Oscar-winning author of Lonesome Dove has written a haunting, elegiac, and occasionally erotic novel about one of his most beloved characters. Duane Moore first made his appearance in The Last Picture Showand, like his author, he has aged but not lost his vigor or his taste for life.

Back from a two-week trip to Egypt, Duane finds he cannot readjust to life in Thalia, the small, dusty, West Texas hometown in which he has spent all of his life. In the short time he was away, it seems that everything has changed alarmingly. His office barely has a reason to exist now that his son Dickie is running the company from Wichita Falls, his lifelong friends seem to have suddenly grown old, his familiar hangout, once a good old-fashioned convenience store, has been transformed into an "Asian Wonder Deli," his daughters seem to have taken leave of their senses and moved on to new and strange lives, and his own health is at serious risk.

It's as if Duane cannot find any solace or familiarity in Thalia and cannot even bring himself to revisit the house he shared for decades with his late wife, Karla, and their children and grandchildren. He spends his days aimlessly riding his bicycle (already a sign of serious eccentricity in West Texas) and living in his cabin outside town. The more he tries to get back to the rhythm of his old life, the more he realizes that he should have left Thalia long ago -- indeed everybody he cared for seems to have moved on without him, to new lives or to death.

The only consolation is meeting the young, attractive geologist, Annie Cameron, whom Dickie has hired to work out of the Thalia office. Annie is brazenlyseductive, yet oddly cold, young enough to be Duane's daughter, or worse, and Duane hasn't a clue how to handle her. He's also in love with his psychiatrist, Honor Carmichael, who after years of rebuffing him, has decided to undertake what she feels is Duane's very necessary sex reeducation, opening him up to some major, life-changing surprises.

For the lesson of When the Light Goes is that where there's life, there is indeed hope -- Duane, widowed, displaced from whatever is left of his own life, suddenly rootless in the middle of his own hometown, and at risk of death from a heart that also doesn't seem to be doing its job, is in the end saved by sex, by love, and by his own compassionate and intense interest in other people and the surprises they reveal.

At once realistic and life-loving, often hilariously funny, and always moving, though without a touch of sentimentality, Larry McMurtry has opened up a new chapter in Duane's life and, in doing so, written one of his finest and most compelling novels to date, doing for Duane what he did so triumphantly for Aurora in Terms of Endearment.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #394639 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

From Publishers Weekly
With less than happy results, McMurtry picks up the story of Duane Moore (Duane's Depressed) two years after he left him alone in a remote Texas cabin, suddenly widowed and among his fractious brood. As Duane, now 64, returns from an impromptu trip to Egypt, he's confronted by Anne Cameron, a young, flirtatious computer expert hired by Duane's son, Dickie (now manager of the small family oil company). Although smitten, Duane is still haunted by the memory of his wife, Karla, and also succumbs to a lassitude about his sex drive that ultimately reveals a more serious health problem. His therapist, Honor Carmichael, decides (after the death of her lover) that all Duane needs is some self-confidence, so she temporarily sets aside her professional ethics (and her lesbianism) to come to his aid. In the meantime, old friends die, as does his tiny town of Thalia (setting of six McMurtry novels, finally swallowed up by creeping sprawl), and his daughters annoy him. Bereft of subplot or complications, this slim novel reads like a short story, and the second half is dominated by vivid but curiously clinical sex scenes. Although amusing in places and full of sharp McMurtry observations and sentences, it's as weak a book as he has produced. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
In his now-classic debut novel, The Last Picture Show(1966), McMurtry introduced readers to a dying Texas town called Thalia and a lively teenager named Duane Moore. McMurtry revisited both in his novels Texasville (1987) and Duane's Depressed (1999), rendering Duane as a sort of West Texas equivalent of Updike's Rabbit Angstrom. McMurtry's latest novel begins with Duane, now 65, returning from an overseas sabbatical designed to relieve his grief for his deceased wife. He finds that his life in Thalia has receded; his children have all moved on, his oil company is successful without him, and he is utterly alone. In walks Annie, a young blond and new employee at the company. Annie flirts with Duane but soon reveals that--despite her 27 years--she knows almost nothing about sex. Duane hasn't learned much either but is willing to share his meager education with Annie. McMurtry keeps the sexual play frank--too frank, with descriptions of Duane's impotence falling under the heading of too much information Although Duane is surprised by his late-blooming sexuality, readers won't be, and his prolonged malaise deadens the impact of his self-discovery. Still, it's nice to know what ultimately becomes of old Duane--even if it isn't particularly enthralling. Jerry Eberle
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
Larry McMurtry is the author of twenty-nine novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove. His other works include two collections of essays, three memoirs, and more than thirty screenplays, including the coauthorship of Brokeback Mountain, for which he received an Academy Award. His most recent novel, When the Light Goes, is available in hardcover from Simon & Schuster. He lives in Archer City, Texas.

Customer Reviews

Survivor Duane
What a great book! Just when you think McMurtry can't pull anything out of his bag of tricks, here comes a slim wonderful volume about starrin Duane Moore. McMurtry presents Moore with a new dilemma, told with his signature sympathy and compassion that makes him one of our best storytellers writing today. Many contemporary writers can take lessons from McMurtry on sheer storytelling genius.

The only flaw in this story was the detailed sex sequences, though at the same time you get a character that is reacting to the current influence of telling everyone way too many details about their private lives.

Long live Duane and long live the writing genius of McMurtry. McMurtry is one of our national treasures, pure storytelling bliss!

More than I bargained for
I liked this book for several reasons. Texasville was the first novel I ever read in my life. I was nine years old. I have since read that one probably fifteen times or maybe more. I thought Duane's Depressed was the saddest book I have ever read. I am a huge fan of Larry McMurtry, and therefore probably biased. I would also strongly recommend reading the other three books in this series before this one. His last few books have been (to most people's ire) shorter ones that he was writing twenty years ago. To me, he is saying more with fewer words, and he is doing it very well. This book says a lot more than any other 195 page book that I have ever read. That is because it had three other books to set the stage for it. It is interesting that in Duane's Depressed and The Evening Star, Mr. McMurtry mentions Proust. Mostly what he says about Remembrance of Things Past in those two books is how daunting it is to try to get through it, the main reason being that it is so long. Mr. McMurtry always seems to be way ahead of the rest of the literary field with ideas that make good novels. I think with the last few he has put out (Telegraph Days, each of the Berrybender novels, Loop Group, the Boone's Lick, and the non-fiction stuff like Roads, Paradise, and Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen) he has been looking for a way for the words to pack more of a punch, therefore making the need for one thousand page epics not so great.
It has also been a great debate over his career about whether he is regional, local, national, worldwide, or whatever. One way to look at it is to say that even though anyone can read a Larry McMurtry book and enjoy it, people who are from or have been around Texas very much can REALLY identify with his writing. More so than any other Texas author.
When the Light Goes and the other three novels in this series each capture perfectly the attitudes and nuances of small Texas oilpatch towns over a span of a fifty year period. I can't think of anything I have read that comes close to that sort of thing except maybe Updike's Rabbit. My view, being a Texan, is that Larry McMurtry is an international talent and an absolute Texas treasure.

Put Out The Light, Please
Duane's World, Part IV

I have recently fulsomely praised Larry McMurtry's The Last Picture Show trilogy (The Last Picture Show; Texasville: Duane's Depressed) a saga centered on the coming of age, mid-life crisis and struggle with mortality of one small town Texas oilman and good old boy Duane Moore. Frankly, I thought with the review of Duane's Depressed concerning Duane's struggle to find relevance in his life as he hovers around old age and faces the grim reaper that I was done with this series. Needless to say that was not the case. Although I wish it were so.

I mentioned in my review of The Last Picture Show that the coming of age story described there boiled down to what to do on high school Friday night-the search for sexual companionship. What to do on high school Saturday night-the search for sex- you get the drift. Apparently in his dotage Duane is hung up on that same aspect of the tragedy behind that human drive except he has included weekdays. That, however, is not enough to sustain this slim novel. Moreover, I believe that Mr. McMurtry knows that as he has tried to spruce up his plot and characters with every current sociological trend known to the American scene- the search for a trophy wife, daughter Nellie's gayness, daughter Julie's nunnery prospects, his lesbian psychiatrist's off-hand desire to throw away all her profession ethics for a chance to go to bed with Duane and the South Asian invasion of the mom and pop business marketplace, reliance on sexual aids, etc. Come on now, Larry this is not even Austin.

I once commented in a review of Howard Fast's Immigrant series set in California over a couple of generations that during the course of the work his characters intersected every possible leftist political impulse in pursue of filling out the story line. I mentioned, at some point well before the last book, that the series had run out of steam. That, sad to say, has happened to Mr. McMurtry here. His story has run out of steam. What is left? Duane as the "stud" at his Thalia (or Wichita Falls) assisted living facility. He deserves better. Larry, put out the light. Please.