How to Read The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:01]How to read the last picture show by Larry McMerry. Okay, so this is uh the book club pick for the Lonear Book Club in June. It's also part of June on the Range because it is what I would consider contemporary western or a post-western. I've got some notes here.

[00:00:21]Obviously know how to read a novel. I don't want to spoil the novel. I don't want to get too far ahead of the discussion of the novel, but I do want to give some details about the novel, frame things in a way so that certain things hit as hard as they possibly can while you're reading it. Lonesome Dove is a novel about the feeling like the future's already left. Okay? It's about a small town. It's about loneliness.

[00:00:50]It's about uh fading dreams. It's about the but really it's it's about the dying of youth in a town that's dying and in a culture that's dying. My name's Randy Ray. This uh this channel is called The Literate Texan. It's a show where I talk about literature and books, highbrow, lowbrow, everything in between. This is somewhere in between. I don't know how high brow is. I don't know how low Brat is, but uh but it's a really great book and I hope that you'll join us in the Lonear Book Club reading uh the last picture show because this is completely free. This is uh you know there's no cost at all involved other than you know you got to get a copy of the book but you can do that cheap enough. So so there's nothing to that. But in this video I want to talk about how to approach The Last Picture Show, about how to approach the novel. I want to talk a little bit about why it matters about why Larry McMerry matters. and I want to invite you to the Lonear Book Club. One of the things that I always try to do is I like to let a book speak for itself. And usually I do that when I'm reviewing a book, but so since I'm kind of previewing this book, I'm going to read just a little bit from the very beginning just to give you a quick taste. It's going to be the only excerpt that I read.

[00:02:07]One, sometimes Sunny felt like he was the only human creature in the town.

[00:02:13]It was a bad feeling.

[00:02:15]and it usually came on him in the mornings early when the streets were completely empty, the way they were one Saturday morning in late November. The night before, Sunny had played his last game of football for Thalia High School.

[00:02:30]But it wasn't that that made him feel so strange and alone. It was just the look of the town. There was only one car parked on the courthouse square, the night watchman's old white Nash. A cold norther was singing in off the planes, swirling long ribbons of dust down Main Street, the only street in Thalia with businesses on it. Sunny's pickup was a 41 Chevrolet, not at its best on cold mornings. In front of the picture show, it coughed out and had to be choked for a while, but then it started again and jerked its way to the red light, blowing out spews of white exhaust that the wind whipped away. And I'm going to stop there, but that just give you a taste of uh McMerry's pros style, which which I'll have more to say about that in a minute. First thing I want to talk about is what kind of novel is The Last Picture Show. Last Picture Show is set in the early 1950s, but it was written and published in 1966 by Larry McMerry, a Texas author. He's from a small town called Carl, Archer City. And Falia is loosely based on Archer City. It's a coming of age novel. Most of the plot has to do with three teenagers and what it's like when you're facing the future and you're growing up. It's it's a coming of age novel, but the future isn't clear and the future of the entire town is dying and this way of life is changing.

[00:04:00]Texas is changing. So that that it's not a plot driven novel. It's it's a it's a place driven novel. It's an atmosphere driven novel. It's a uh it's an emotionalbased novel. So So you can't expect a lot of don't don't be asking yourself what's going to happen next. If you do, you'll be kind of bored by it.

[00:04:25]It's a character-driven novel. What you want to ask yourself is who these people are. Why are they behaving in the way that they do? And why is the author portraying them in the way that he is?

[00:04:35]One of the things that I like about Larry McMurray is he displays these characters warts in the hall.

[00:04:41]And they're not all good. In fact, there's no heroes in this book in particular. That's not what this book is about. This is about the after heroes, you know, after the idea of the frontier hero is gone, what do you do now? Especially if you're a a guy, you know, it addresses questions of masculinity, you know, after the mythology of the West is kind of gone on and moved on. It's called The Last Picture Show in part because the early 1950s was a significant time in the United States because before that movie culture was a really really big thing. The country was transitioning from a movie culture into a TV-based culture.

[00:05:27]And the movie feels the book feels surprisingly modern even though it was written in ' 66 and it's about the 50s because we are still facing similar transitions. You know we've transitioned from a TVbased culture to an internetbased culture to a social mediumbased culture and now we're sort of transitioning to an AI based culture. One of the big themes of the novel is boredom and loneliness. And that feels modern, too, but in different ways.

[00:06:00]We're constantly being stimulated now, but we're also still bored and we're feeling more disconnected than ever, even though theoretically we're in touch with more people than we ever have been before. That's why this novel still hits so hard.

[00:06:14]The last picture shows only about 250 pages long. I think last year for June on the Range, we read uh Lonesome Dove.

[00:06:21]I I may not remember that correctly, but Lonesome Dove of course is massive. But this is a short novel, 250 pages. If you read it really aggressively quickly, which I don't recommend, you can finish it in four hours. I recommend it reading it slowly, letting the atmosphere and the mood of the novel build up and accumulate. That's the way it's meant to be read. You know, it take a good eight hours to read. You can finish it in a week. We're going to read it over the course of a month. So, you know, with 250 pages, we're looking at less than 100 pages a week, you know, 60 70 pages a week. It also depends on which edition of the book that you have, okay? But it's it's a book where nothing seems to happen, but eventually you realize that everything is happening.

[00:07:09]The town is dying. Way of life is dying.

[00:07:12]And uh there are big changes going on for the people in the novel, but they're not necessarily big overt changes. They're happening internally for these people.

[00:07:26]>> It's largely about young people trying to figure out adulthood, but they're trying to figure out adulthood in a town, in a setting where the future has already moved on. There's not much of a future to look for in this small town.

[00:07:41]Why is The Last Picture Show worth reading today? I addressed that a little bit, but I want to get into a little bit more detail about it here.

[00:07:49]Like I said, it's about boredom and it's about emotional drift. These are things that that matter today as much as ever, maybe even more. It's about dying communities. I live in Texas and I see this all the time. I grew up in a small town in Texas, so I can relate to this in ways that maybe not every reader can.

[00:08:08]It's also a novel about loneliness.

[00:08:10]Loneliness and boredom are perennially subjects in literature, but now as much or more so than ever. It's about our shared culture and how our shared culture changes and what happens when it changes. but it's about ordinary people and it just has a lot of relevance to life today that you wouldn't necessarily expect it to have. It's surprising in that way.

[00:08:40]The people in this novel feel trapped between nostalgia and and and an uncertain empty future.

[00:08:50]And I want to talk about the Texas angle for just a second. Okay, this is not the mythological Texas that you'll see in a traditional western. Okay, this is a postwestern western. Okay, this is this is real Texas. Um, as lived by the author, you know, he dedicates the book lovingly to his hometown of Archer City, which Thalia is loosely based on. I don't know why he didn't just call it Archer City, but but yeah, he he named the town Thealia in the book, but it's very clearly based on Archer City, which isn't far from where I live. It's about an hour and a half from here.

[00:09:26]Mc Merry used to own a bookstore out in Archer City and uh I always meant to go out there because I always wanted to meet him because he he actually worked at his bookstore and uh I owned a bookstore for a while too and I it gave me the perfect opportunity to meet him and talk to him about something because uh my understanding is that you could go to his bookstore and he would love to talk about the book selling business with you. He didn't like talking about his career as an author or the books that he'd written with the customers.

[00:09:53]But, you know, if you wanted to come in and talk about the book selling business, alas, I never took advantage of that when I could, and I'm I'm real sad about it. But, you know, regrets, I've got a few. You can compare this uh novel to to Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. You could compare this to Richard Rouso. We just read Empire Falls last month. That's similar kind of novel. Um, Nobody's Fool is another novel by Richard Rouso that that's similar. Uh, Kent Hariff is another uh novelist who writes about ordinary people in small towns and that kind of sadness. I believe uh I read Plain Song last year. It was another really short novel along these lines. These are kind of novels that I tend to enjoy. So, you know, I'm hosting the book club. So, uh so so yeah, and the book club is easy enough to join. Okay. Uh, I'll be posting uh probably a weekly video here on the channel. You can leave comments, discuss the novel in the comments, but also and this is this is where the real magic happens. Get in touch with me on Voxer. My contact information on Voxer is in the description of all my videos and I'll form a Voxer discussion group for this. And that's where the real magic happens because Voxer is kind of a if you're not familiar with it already, it's it's a chat voicemail type uh app.

[00:11:18]And so we'll leave voicemails for the entire group discussing the novel. And what happens there is just magical. You you'll have a hard time finding a better group of people to discuss a book with than you will on Voxer. So yeah, please join in if this sounds at all like something you'd be interested in because it's going to be big fun. Then again, fun may not be the word for it, but if you like exploring literature in this way, um, I think you know, you you'll enjoy the the experience on Voxer. I want to talk just a little bit about my relationship with with Larry McMurray and the literature of Larry McMerry.

[00:11:52]Okay. And uh, a lot of people know Larry McMerry because of his most famous work, which is Lonesome Dove, which is great big western. There was a miniseries, his book. A lot of people read the book that never read books and really really loved it. And it is indeed a masterpiece. It's terrific and it's just as long as the last picture show is short. Okay. But I was introduced to Larry McMerry in college. It was uh I had an assigned reading. It was Horseman passed by. It was in my freshman humanities class. I was in the honors program at instead of taking uh the traditional world literature courses, we had a humanities course that was team taught by uh Dr. Barrett and Dr. Olser and Dr. Miko, A Horseman Pass By was a similar size novel published around the same time. He wrote uh he wrote several novels about this dying of small town life in Texas.

[00:12:47]Uh Leaving Cheyenne, The Last Picture Show and Horsemen Pass by. But so this is the kind of novel that I got introduced to Larry McMerry by and it was it was terrific. I loved it. And I went on to read stuff like Terms of Endearment, which he also wrote and was made into a major motion picture. that a lot of people loved and uh and of course slo he wrote 36 novels. I mean he was a career novelist but four or five of those have been made into motion pictures. Most successful modern literary authors are lucky to get one major motion picture made out of their their novels. Mc Merry had at least four. I got to see him speak one time and this was really cool at this after I had graduated. It was in the 90s, but he did a uh a talk about turning literature into movies turning and it was it was just fascinating going to listen to him talk about this stuff. It was really cool. He actually went to back when it was still NTSU. Might have been uh NTSC back then. I'm not I don't I'm not sure, but he lived here in Denton uh for a while, too. The house where he lived is still here. I always have a fantasy about going to rent the house that that Larry McMerry lived here and didn't, but it's not for rent. I don't know that uh I don't know if the people who own it live in it or if they rent it out or or or what, but I keep my eye on the property just to see if I ever get a chance to to actually move in there. But Larry McMurray is one of my personal literary heroes. And so this particular month, I'm really proud to be hosting this because uh it's it's going to be a lot of fun. Larry McMurray will probably be on the agenda for the Lonear Book Club in for years to come. You know, with 36 books, you know, if I host the Lonear Book Club for the next 36 years, we'll read 36 Larry McMurray books and we'll still be talking about Larry McMurray when I'm in my 90s.

[00:14:40]One of the things that I like about Larry McMurray is he writes about ordinary people, but he's very compassionate about it. You can tell that he cares about his characters, and his characters run the gamut. Some of them are cruel. Some of them are bored.

[00:14:53]They're restless. Some of them are are aimless.

[00:14:57]Some are just plain ridiculous. But he never mocks or condescends the characters in his novels, which is one of the things that I love so much about his writing. Also, his pros is really approachable. It's It's not difficult pros. You heard me read it earlier, but uh you know, it's not difficult to read.

[00:15:16]the emotional stuff builds up, but he has one of these invisible pro styles.

[00:15:22]You don't really realize how good a writer he is until you're about halfway through the book or quarter of the way through the book and you're like, "Wow, this is really impressive what he's done here."

[00:15:34]So, let's to get into the nuts and bolts about it. Let's talk about how to read Lonesome Dove. The first thing is don't read it for the plot, okay? Um, I'm going to talk about The Great Gatsby, which is another book club selection that I'm hosting over on my Patreon channel, and I'll have a video about it up probably tomorrow, the next day. You don't read Great Gatsby for the plot either. Instead, you read it for the atmosphere, but also for the emotional accumulation, and you read it about the relationships of the character, both with each other and with themselves. You know, what's happening there? That's what you want to pay attention to.

[00:16:10]And I want to point out in this particular uh novel, failure, the setting is not just a backdrop for the action, okay? It is practically a character itself. And so I want you to think about the movie theater, uh the cafes, the pool hall, the football field, and all the empty spaces because all of that is very important to the novel. And if you think about failia as a character unto itself, I think you're going to get more out of the novel and it's going to hit you a little harder.

[00:16:40]Okay. I also want you to pay attention to the loneliness of the characters. All the characters, both the young characters and the older characters are dealing with loneliness. That's a running theme throughout the novel. It may not be obvious at first, but that is what's going on here. So, look for that.

[00:16:58]These characters are looking for meaning. Okay? They're looking for acceptance. They're looking for escape, okay? They're all in search of something. They all want stuff. And part of the what you want to do while you're reading the book is figure out what they want and what's their likelihood of actually achieving it. And when you're dealing with a town like Thalia, and I grew up in Bonum, Texas, which is also a town like Thalia, the town does teach you what to expect from the future. And sadly in a lot of cases the message that you get from the town is expect less.

[00:17:36]One thing I want you to do too, don't look for heroes because you're not going to find any heroes in this book. There are no heroes. They're ordinary people with flaws. They've got good traits.

[00:17:46]They've got bad traits. Sometimes they're moral. Sometimes they're immoral. What they do makes sense to them. McMerry is kind enough to treat these people with compassion and without condescension. And I feel like to get the most out of the novel, you should do the same. Don't treat the characters with condescension. Try to be compassionate even to the characters you don't like.

[00:18:09]So, a lot of people read the novel and they pay close attention to the three main characters, the three young characters, Sunny, Dwayne, and Jaci.

[00:18:17]Okay?

[00:18:19]But there are older characters in the book, too, and they're important. And you should pay attention to them because they represent a dying way of life and an older way of being and they also haven't necessarily done the best job in the world of passing along their wisdom to this next generation.

[00:18:43]Do they feel bad about that? I don't know. You know, that'll be something to discuss as we read the book. But I think reading the novel and only paying attention to the young people in the novel is a mistake. I think paying attention to the older people in the novel is is an important thing to do.

[00:18:59]It's easy to underestimate McMerry style because it is so understated. It is so subtle. But I want to suggest that the best way to read this novel is to read it slowly. It's easy to read quickly.

[00:19:13]You know, you like I say, you could rush through it in four hours easily, maybe even three hours if you really get aggressive about it. It's not a long novel, but I don't think that's the way to get the most out of it. You know, stop every once in a while, think about what you just read, slow down, reread some of the sentences. If something feels particularly important to you, maybe even write it down in your commonplace book. I wrote a uh I made a video not too long ago ago about how to keep a commonplace book. There will be quotable places in this novel that you can copy into your commonplace book and should. And that's a wonderful way to slow down and appreciate the novel even more.

[00:19:55]>> If you've read books by Anne Tyler or or Richard Rouso, which we talked about earlier, Kent Hariff, you already know what McMerry writes like. You know, he doesn't announce the tragedy. He lets you realize it along with the characters as you go along in the book.

[00:20:15]And I got just a little bit to say about the main characters in the book and what to look for with them. Sunny is the first character. That was who I was just reading about there. He's kind of a really sensitive character and he's a little bit passive. He's still figuring things out just like all the characters are. Um he can be frustrating but he's not finished emotionally. Dwayne on the other hand is the other character. Now he represents this restless masculine energy but it's undirected. He doesn't know what to do with all this masculine energy that he has. Um great character and this is the beginning of a series of books by the way. Uh there are five books in the falia sequence and uh and they're all really good. My favorite of the books is actually the third book Dwayne's depressed which is about Dwayne. The third main character is JC Pharaoh. She's played by Civil Shepard in the movie and she's terrific, but she's a young woman and she's really bored and restless and she's putting on an act, but she's wanting way more out of small town life than she can expect.

[00:21:20]and she's trying to figure out how to get it, but she's focused largely on curing her own boredom and also uh you know what to what to do with herself, you know, and and she can seem kind of cruel and she can seem like she misuses her sexuality, but there's a lot to sympathize there with her if you look for her. Finally, the other main character, and he's the moral center of this particular novel, is Sam the Lion. I want you to pay close attention to Sam the Lion while you read this book because he's one of the older characters that I was talking about earlier. And uh and he's a really great character, so pay close attention to him, too. Sam's all about dignity. He's about remembering what the past used to be like in this town. Um you know, if there's a nostalgic character in the book, it's him. If there's a character that represents regret that the future is changing and that the town is dying, it's Sam the Lion. personifies this.

[00:22:19]This book's also historically significant because it was published in 1966. So, it's looking back at the early 1950s and there's a lot going on in the early 1950s. Okay? You're transitioning from a TV culture, from a movie based culture to a TV based culture. We talked about that. That's right there in the title, the Last Picture Show. But also, you know, you're dealing with uh the frontier is is dying. It's going away.

[00:22:45]gradually admittedly, but it is going away. You're also dealing with the post-war transition. You know, uh World War II is has been over for a while and you know what do we do with ourselves now kind of stuff. Small towns are dying. The small town way of life is dying. I can relate to this. This was still going on in the 1970s. I remember having a conversation with my father when he was still alive and this was probably sometime in the uh in the as 2002 2003. We were talking and and I was explaining to him that if we lived long enough, you would see from Dallas all the way to the Red River, you know, which is probably about a 2-hour drive.

[00:23:25]It was all going to be strip malls and towns, you know, a lot of fields and farmland out there now. But I told Daddy if he lived long enough, we would see that. And he didn't believe me. But I think he might have believed me and just been scared of it. He didn't want it to be like that. He didn't want to see one large metroplex that stretched all the way from Dallas to Oklahoma, but that's exactly what we're getting. And we're seeing the beginnings of that in the last picture show. And it's a really sad thing to watch. We should talk just a little about what not to expect from the book because I don't want you to be disappointed. Okay? I don't want you to expect a traditional western because this is not a traditional western. You probably got that idea already. Um, this is not a no nostalgic loving small town kind of stuff. This isn't Mayberry RFD. This is not Andy Griffith in in novel format at all.

[00:24:16]Okay, it's a lot sad and a lot deeper than that. This is not a fastmoving plot, okay? There's not a lot externally that's happening here. There's not a mystery or anything like that. Um, what you can expect is is kind of a simple moral story about loneliness, about drift, um, about disenchantment.

[00:24:40]It's it's the emotional realism, but if anything, it's just about this fading frontier identity, the dying of the Old West. That's that's what it's about.

[00:24:52]That's what you can expect.

[00:24:54]And why is this such a great book for a book club?

[00:24:57]because of the discussion. Okay, I'm going to throw some questions out there and there will be more questions as we have our little multiple videos throughout the month of June about this, but but you know, they're not lectures.

[00:25:11]It's really more of a guided literary discussion, but here's some of the questions that are great for a book club discussion about this novel. Okay. Um, is the novel nostalgic or critical?

[00:25:25]Um, what does Falia represent?

[00:25:32]And what does Sam the Lion represent too? Is the town dying or is it already dead?

[00:25:42]The title of the novel is the last picture show. What is the last picture show? What does that actually represent? That's another question to ask yourself as you're reading it.

[00:25:53]What is it that Mc Mercury seems to understand about Texas and is trying to communicate to people? What is it that he understands about these people in Texas? Now, these aren't just great discussion questions, by the way. These are great prompts if you journal about what you read. These are great questions to ask yourself and write about in your journal if you're not sure what to write about. And and we're not limited to those questions either. There's more.

[00:26:17]One of the questions is Thaleia portrayed lovingly or is it portrayed cruy or hostile? You know, by by McMerry is uh Sunny is Sunny uh weak or is he just confused? Is Ji cruel or she just feel trapped? Um, is Dwayne just an ass or is he just an example of male energy that he doesn't know what to do with? Now, some of the answers to these questions are obvious just from the discussion that we're having so far, but watch them unfold. Think about them because we're going to talk about them this month and there's a lot to talk about here. So, I want to invite you again to come along with this, okay?

[00:27:03]Because it's short but really powerful novel. It's a fun way to get involved with the Lonear Book Club. if you're not already. It's free, okay? And uh it's emotionally rich and there's a lot to discuss. This is a novel about people living after the stories that gave meaning to their world are all ended, what happens. It's a story about what's it like living during the epilogue.

[00:27:31]Okay, so before if you want to participate, talk to me down in the comments. Let me know. um hit me up on Voxer. I'll add you to the Voxer group right away, the discussion group that we're going to have on Voxer. And then uh you know, because there'll be an ongoing discussion there and stuff. And before this next video comes out, please stay hydrated. It's so much more important than you think. And I also want you to know book, I love you guys.

[00:27:58]Y'all stay sexy.