A lot of us know Duane Jackson from “The Last Picture Show” (1971), which introduced him as a very young man growing up in a dusty and dying Texas town - "Anarene, Texas, 1951, Nothing much has changed..."
We followed him through Larry McMurtry's novels set in Anarene/Thalia/Archer City as everything in oilman Duane's life changed with the fluctuations of the oil business. Archer City's real, and the author's hometown, where he still lives. We can deduce that much of Duane's story is McMurtry's; although the author never became a super-rich oilman, he did become rich and famous through his writing, and won an Academy Award for the script of Broke Back Mountain, written with Diana Ossana, his life and writing companion for several years now.
Duane is elderly in Rhino Ranch, McMurtry is 73. Both have had heart attacks. Both have an openly hostile relationship with the tiny hometown (pop. 1,800), according to D (for Dallas) magazine. That's easy to understand when you read Duane's remarks about people who never read a book and consider that McMurtry has imported one of the world's largest collections of books into the little town.
Duane is elderly in Rhino Ranch, McMurtry is 73. Both have had heart attacks. Both have an openly hostile relationship with the tiny hometown (pop. 1,800), according to D (for Dallas) magazine. That's easy to understand when you read Duane's remarks about people who never read a book and consider that McMurtry has imported one of the world's largest collections of books into the little town.
They're as exotic as the African rhinos imported into Thalia by billionairess K.K. Slater, who thinks they'll make a dandy tourist attraction.
Duane is even more depressed than he was in the last Thalia book, Duane's Depressed, in which his lesbian psychotherapist insisted he visit Egypt to cheer up after a heart attack. An odd choice, given the country's focus on death, but it did once have a giant library in Alexandria. At the time, McMurtry said it was his last book about the dusty little town. He says that again about this one.
Duane is even more depressed than he was in the last Thalia book, Duane's Depressed, in which his lesbian psychotherapist insisted he visit Egypt to cheer up after a heart attack. An odd choice, given the country's focus on death, but it did once have a giant library in Alexandria. At the time, McMurtry said it was his last book about the dusty little town. He says that again about this one.
He's interested in the Rhino Ranch, and especially in one of its occupants, the 3,500 pound rhino that frequently walks with him, which he calls Double Aught (the name of the largest size of buckshot.) One day the rhino just disappears. So do a young former porn star who takes up with him briefly, and a San tribesman Slater imports to tend the animals.
Duane doesn't give any of the disappearances much thought; things come, things go. He has quite a Zen attitude to life and has become fairly reclusive, spending much of his time at an isolated cabin, having the occasional laconic conversations with his old pals and the occasional dinner (chicken fried steak with cream gravy-that can't be good for a bad heart) in the town's one pretty bad restaurant.
Considering the protagonist's apparent exhaustion and lack of interest in much of anything, it's surprisingly fun to read, and ponder whether that huge rhinoceros is a symbol for the weight of history. McMurtry has said frequently that in writing his stories of the old West he wanted to de-mythologize its heroic image. That hasn't worked very well, but if you haven't read his early efforts it's worth catching up with Lonesome Dove and the dynamically aging Aurora Greenway of Terms of Endearment and Evening Star. They're excellent movies too, with Shirley Maclaine as Aurora and Jack Nicholson as her ex-astronaut lover.
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