DUANE’S DEPRESSED
Larry McMurtry
Alfred A. Knopf, 2009
375 pages
Although Lonesome Dove, published in 1985, won McMurtry a Pulitzer Prize, he said in an interview years later with John Spong, that Duane’s Depressed was his best book. Many agree that this third and final story set in Thalia, Texas, shows him at the height of his skill in creating depth of character.
Duane Moore, grown from adolescence in The Last Picture Show to middle age in Texasville, turns up at sixty-two in Duane’s Depressed. He enters “. . . a man who had driven pickups for as long as he had been licensed to drive—parked pickup in his own carport one day and began to walk wherever he went.” With that, the reader plunges into the first of the novel’s three books, The Walker and His Family. Along with book 2, The Walker and His Doctor, and book 3, The Walker and Marcel Proust, the reader comes to know intimately the misery of depression. Duane could be any person who wakes up one day and realizes he’s not sure who he is, but whoever he is, he’s sick of continuing the life he’s lived.
Certainly, that could be a grim novel indeed, but not in the hands of McMurtry. Typical of him, the style is plain so the reader relates to the character directly without having to be amazed or intimidated by the writer’s style. The author all but disappears and the reader joins Duane bicycling toward discovering a person he wants to be.
Thalia,Texas, the setting, is familiar in its barren sameness evoked in spare prose. Many of the characters return from the earlier two novels in the trilogy. They all soon hear of Duane’s aberrant behavior. No one walks. Surely he’s gone crazy. The reader is familiar with returning characters who have grown older along with Duane—his wife Karla; his now almost blind secretary and confidante Ruth Popper; his friend Bobby Lee; along with the four Moore children and their children, all of whom are forced to change for the better when Duane becomes frighteningly unfamiliar walking through their lives.
Duane’s walking, searching for who he should be isn’t the only action in the book. There is, in fact, a beginning, a middle and an end that creates a plot. All that happens—family deaths, friends’ deaths, encounters with mental health professionals, edicts that shock his children out of their extended adolescences—meld into a never-boring tale that ends just as it should.
If you choose to read Duane’s Depressed for the first time, expect to return to Duane in your thoughts. He’s that much a person, not simply a character, by the time you finish. And if you read it twenty-five years ago, and choose it again, you may be surprised how your appreciation has grown with the passing years. –Teddy Jones