After The Last Picture Show TEXASVILLE

By John Skow

( You can tell right off when a novelist knows his way around the block. Take the first sentence of Larry McMurtry's moody, sensitive, ironic yet lightheartedly despairing new novel: "Duane was in the hot tub, shooting at his new doghouse with a .44 Magnum." The Jamesian restraint of the language -- not "Blam, blam, blam, wood chips glinted in the dusty air," but a dreamlike, almost passive kind of doghouse blasting -- foreshadows subtle stuff. The hero, we sense, is a country boy (the name Duane, and the implication that there is enough vacant acreage behind the doghouse so that stray bullets won't perforate anything important) whose new prosperity (the hot tub) leaves him strangely dissatisfied (the pulsating jets do not soothe him) and struggling to express his feelings (that hogleg Magnum).

Well, sure. What we have here is middle age, a ton of bricks anywhere, but a real stunner to Duane in Thalia, Texas. Life and geography have not prepared him for the existential blahs. He was a high school football hero of sorts in McMurtry's wry 1966 novel The Last Picture Show. Since then he has made a fair-size bundle in the oil business, but aerobic spending and the collapse of crude prices have left him ear-deep in debt, and sinking. He doesn't much care. He and his wife Karla are both good-looking and healthy in their 40s, but he isn't aroused by her, even to sexual antagonism. Their recent marital enterprise has been what economists call, approvingly, consumer activity: building a mansion that Duane hates, filling it with trendy furniture and appliances, and one day, more than usually bored, buying the damn doghouse, a two-story log affair built to resemble a Western fort. Naturally Duane's red- eyed pooch Shorty won't go near this oddity. McMurtry neatly establishes both that Shorty has a firmer grip on things than his master and that Duane, though distracted, is not a bad egg; there is no dog in the doghouse he is cannonading. Still, Shorty does have problems: Can his master get it together to open a can of Alpo?

Texasville is McMurtry's eleventh novel, and by now his wonderfully loose- jointed narrative style slips in and out of comic exaggeration with practiced ease. There are no seams between the ambling lies of the 19th century frontier yarn spinner (his literary heritage) and the slick ambiguities of the 20th century novelist. When the tall tales have room to unwind to the horizon, as they do in Lonesome Dove (1985), McMurtry's haunting legend of the last cattle drives, the result is extraordinary. This sort of storytelling works best with a lot of action, however, and the new novel describes a man becalmed.

Somewhat rowdily becalmed, to be sure. Duane rather absentmindedly conducts affairs with two mistresses; at the book's end, he wanders through a centennial pageant in which 60,000 eggs are thrown, many of them by Duane and Karla's eleven-year-old twins, who, he says truthfully, "seemed as uninfluenceable as wild animals." But middle age is a predicament, not a journey, and thus essentially undramatic. At the end of The Last Picture Show, Duane, who had joined the service and was headed for Korea, left his secondhand Mercury with his friend Sonny, saying, "See you in a year or two, if I don't get shot." It was a good, macho exit line. At the end of Texasville, he doesn't go anywhere, and doesn't even go crazy, though bankruptcy court still looms. No exit line; no exit.

The static quality of the plot may be what limits the characterizations of the novel's two important women. Karla is vivid enough. She has taken to communicating by wearing T shirts printed with the titles of hillbilly songs (like You're the Reason Our Children Are Ugly, sung by Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty). More than halfway through the book, Duane notices her in a blank T shirt; her glum explanation is that she has nothing more to say. Then there is the onetime teen queen Jacy, over whom Duane and Sonny fought in high school. She has returned to Thalia after several marriages and a career as a movie star in Europe. She goes trolling for Duane, but he evades her, queasy about disturbing painful memories. That is a believably cowardly male response; McMurtry's women, of course, are implacable in pursuit of such pain. His insight ends here, however. He hints at alarming strength in both Karla and Jacy, but does not find ways to show its sources or workings-out.

The other important character from the early novel is Sonny, the shadowed, sensitive boy through whom the reader saw the dusty sadness of the worn-down little town. In Picture Show, Sonny had a love affair with Ruth, the wife of the cloddish football coach, but it was the self-absorbed Jacy he yearned after and with whom he tried to elope. Now he takes little notice of her return. His mind seems to be losing its hold on present time.

At first it is assumed that he is merely forgetful. Then he is discovered in the long-ago burned-out shell of Thalia's movie theater, sitting in one of the ) two remaining seats, staring into empty air. He is running old movies in his head. This scene of memory flooding out everything, overwhelming the present -- this last picture show -- is corny, stagy, shamelessly sentimental, the kind of thing only a storyteller given to shaggy exaggerations would try. The reader is inclined to think that McMurtry gets away with it.