» "He's the biblio equivalent of a cutting horse."
book/daddy on Larry McMurtry’s memoir Books:
I kept wishing for… something deeper and more reflective. We get a snapshot portrait, and McMurtry’s sigh…. Yet it’s precisely the elegy, the marking of loss, that has long been McMurtry’s great mode: All of those novels about the passing of the Old West, all of those novels about coming of age or dying off in the new West, all of those novels with titles of death and isolation and departure: Leaving Cheyenne, Dead Man’s Walk, Moving On, By Sorrow’s River, Lonesome Dove, All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers.
What’s more, McMurtry himself has often made the analogy between cowboys herding cattle and the writer’s task of herding words into paragraphs on a page…. He’s the biblio equivalent of a cutting horse. So rather than some eccentric distraction from McMurtry’s grand themes, chronicling the slow decline of a venerable generation of antiquarians is very much in his range.
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