Product Description

In a lucid, brilliant work of nonfiction -- as close to an autobiography as his readers are likely to get -- Larry McMurtry has written a family portrait that also serves as a larger portrait of Texas itself, as it was and as it has become.

Using as a springboard an essay by the German literary critic Walter Benjamin that he first read in Archer City's Dairy Queen, McMurtry examines the small-town way of life that big oil and big ranching have nearly destroyed. He praises the virtues of everything from a lime Dr. Pepper to the lost art of oral storytelling, and describes the brutal effect of the sheer vastness and emptiness of the Texas landscape on Texans, the decline of the cowboy, and the reality and the myth of the frontier.

McMurtry writes frankly and with deep feeling about his own experiences as a writer, a parent, and a heart patient, and he deftly lays bare the raw material that helped shape his life's work: the creation of a vast, ambitious, fictional panorama of Texas in the past and the present. Throughout, McMurtry leaves his readers with constant reminders of his all-encompassing, boundless love of literature and books.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #25376 in Books
• Published on: 2001-08-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780684870199
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Amazon.com Review
Do you really want to listen to a cranky old man ramble on about his childhood, his heart surgery, his hobbies, his son, and the way things, in general, aren't what they used to be? It turns out you do. In Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, Larry McMurtry comes the old pardner, and the result is a powerful elegy for the lost spaces in American life. He takes as his starting point an afternoon he spent at the Dairy Queen in Archer City, Texas, reading the pensées of early 20th-century German philosopher Walter Benjamin. At the time Benjamin was writing, McMurtry's grandparents were settling dusty reaches of west Texas, and McMurtry crosscuts neatly between Benjamin's spent, smoky Europe and his own grandparents' America: "While my grandparents were dealing with almost absolute emptiness, both social and cultural, Europe was approaching an absolute (and perhaps intolerable) density." McMurtry demonstrates a confidence almost bordering on naiveté in the way he appropriates the great thinking of Europe and applies it to his own history. He apologizes neither to the highfalutin Europeans nor to the down-home Americans, but makes them lie down together any way he sees fit. This brio makes Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen a thrilling read.

McMurtry's book-length essay loops outward from Archer City to encompass a polemic against computers, a foray into the world of book collecting, a family biography, an account of his soul-loss after heart surgery, and finally an elegy for the cowboy. This last lament casts a shadow back over what we've read. Not just over this book, but over McMurtry's whole body of work. A man who's lived his whole life in print gives us a glimpse of what has fed him, and, strangely, it's loss. "Because of when and where I grew up, on the Great Plains just as the herding tradition was beginning to lose its vitality, I have been interested all my life in vanishing breeds." The master of storytelling is finally revealed as a master of melancholy. --Claire Dederer

From Publishers Weekly
After reading an essay by Walter Benjamin in a Dairy Queen during his hometown's centennial celebration, McMurtry set out to ponder how Benjamin's conclusions about the death of the oral tradition apply to his own desolate patch of Texas cattle country. That essay, "The Storyteller," is the touchstone McMurtry returns to throughout this digressive, erudite and frequently glum assessment of his career and the importance of storytelling. "Real curiosity," he writes, "now gets little chance to developAit's smothered with information before it can draw a natural breath." Taking a break from writing fiction to think "about place, about my life, about literature and my relation to it," the bestselling author (Comanche Moon, etc.) and purveyor of antiquarian books offers prickly appraisals of great writers. A devotee of European literature, McMurtry considers Virginia Woolf's diaries and Proust's 12-volume opus the White Nile and Blue Nile of language. As for critics, he spurns theorists for those he considers great readers (Susan Sontag, Edmund Wilson and V.S. Pritchett, among others). Surveying his own two dozen books, he feels much like his cattle ranching father at the end of his life, contemplating his "too meager acres" and concluding he could have done more. At the same time, McMurtry claims he has exhausted the themes that interest him and hints that he may be done with fiction for good. The most infectious element in this book-length essay is McMurtry's passion for reading, which was rooted in boyhood and blossomed into a lifelong quest to understand the European culture that spawned his own pioneer familyAa quest that brings him full circle back to Benjamin. It all adds up to a thoughtful, elegant retrospective on Texas, his work and the meaning of reading by an author who has the range to write with intelligence about both Proust and the bathos of a Holiday Inn marquee.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
When McMurtry (of Lonesome Dove fame) was coming up in Archer County, TX, books other than the Bible were as scarce as company. In this roundabout and finely written memoir, McMurtry approaches the topic of storytelling (using German literary critic Benjamin as a springboard) by telling his own.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

The best non-fiction of 1999.
For those that aren't familiar with Larry McMurtry's body of work, this book will seem to be a stand-alone effort. But, in reality, it is truly a sequel to his first book of essays - "In A Narrow Grave: Essays On Texas" (1968). If one hasn't read "Narrow Grave", it should probably be read first (or re-read if one hasn't recently). As far as storytellers go (the tie-in to "Walter Benjamin At The DQ"), McMurtry is certainly the last gifted storyteller concerning the Texas from the 1880's through this century. This new book is, I suspect, just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the experiences of his dozens of now-deceased family members that he could set down either as straight history or as material for a definitive character (perhaps the "biography" of Sam the Lion prior to "The Last Picture Show"). Regardless, the things learned about McMurtry's own life are both endearing and entertaining. After reading the books, one should visit both Archer County and Archer City to try and soak up some of the elements that are a part of Larry McMurtry (and, of course, having a lime Dr Pepper at the DQ shouldn't be missed; neither should a visit to the bookstores where he has rounded up his herds of books - it's quite an experience).

Short but excellent!
McMurtry has proven himself and his talent time after time in a long career at the very top of his profession. His homey Americana themes are universal, his catchy, light-hearted prose is regionally charming and his lively plotting certainly has more depth than that of John Steinbeck (and I'm a big Steinbeck fan, by the way). McMurtry's latest, "Walter Benjamin At The Dairy Queen" (subtitled "Reflections at Sixty and Beyond") is the autobiography his legions of fans have been eagerly anticipating for decades. In the summer of 1980, McMurtry sat in a booth at the Dairy Queen on the southern outskirts of Archer City and studied "The Storyteller," Walter Benjamin's classic, in-depth essay on the nature of narrative. With Benjamin's ideas in mind, McMurtry began exploring his own narrative nature. How was it, McMurtry wondered, that a shy young man raised in a desolate, harsh place that had just recently been settled, "...a place where absolutely nothing of any cultural or historical importance had ever happened..." became an accomplished novelist? And a successful one at that? As documented in "Walter Benjamin At The Dairy Queen," McMurtry's search for answers to this and similar questions over the nearly 20 years since beginning his journey of self-discovery is truly remarkable. Spread generously among the provable academic facts, are some of the most revealing life details of this most private of word masters. For instance, even though he virtually grew up in the saddle, riding herd on a hard-working, dry land cattle ranch, McMurtry never considered himself a cowboy; and never wanted to. Instead, he yearned for nothing more strenuous or complicated than owning good books. In fact, McMurtry took up writing only because of his life-long love of reading. When his cousin went off to WWII, little six-year-old Larry became the delighted recipient of a box of paperback novels. Those nineteen volumes of pulp fiction lit a fire in the country boy's young soul. Almost fifty years later, McMurtry is one of the largest dealers in collectible and out-of-print books in the country, if not the biggest. But it was tough going at first. Through his high school and college years, McMurtry's voracious appetite for books only grew and grew. For a time during his poverty-stricken undergraduate days, he even occupied my literary review desk with the Wichita Falls TIMES and RECORD NEWS because of the steady supply of expensive new books that still come free with the byline. "...all I remember," he writes of those days, "is the thrill of opening the packages of books when they came, seeing what wonders had been cast up on my doorstep. " "Walter Benjamin At The Dairy Queen" is an unforgettable life's story that's as hard to put aside as it is easy to read. Sprinkled with family photos, anecdotes and lessons learned on his rise to the very pinnacle of the wordsmiths' vocation, this one is an all-too-short treasure trove of first person insight on an American literary giant.

I connected with reflections at my age of 61
The New York Times called this a peculiar book but they must not read much Larry McMurtry. This was a wonderful series of essays explaining much of the writing that he has done during his lifetime. I copied many of the sentences Larry wrote about reading because they were my experiences also. I too grew up on a farm and my reading habit is directly connected to that life. My love of reading is my life, and many of my favorite books are ones by Larry McMurtry. He can describe people better than most other authors. I have a better understanding of how he does that now that I've read this book. The honesty that Larry uses in describing his own life is startling. I'm going to look up Walter Benjamin now, I'm intrigued with the storyteller quotation.