Frye ’ s division of McMurtry ’ s major novels sensibly follows the author ’ s thematic groupings : the Thalia and Houston trilogies each receive a separate chapter treatment . Frye observes how small town Thalia , no less so than the burgeoning metropolis of Houston , seems in a state of perpetual flux to its inhabitants . Thalia is explored as an archetypal dying town , a remnant of ranch culture gradually supplanted by Big Oil . It seems almost a character in itself , bearing mute witness to its own slow secession of ( literal , figurative ) ground to the suburban and urban . Frye , here and elsewhere , perceptively analyzes McMurtry ’ s sensitivities to place and region amidst the social currents that appears throughout his body of work .
Frye posits that most of these currents come together in the Lonesome Dove multi-volume saga . This eponymous 1985 novel is best remembered by some for the later mini-series , but the best-seller garnered considerable critical acclaim — a Pulitzer Prize for fiction not least of which — alongside healthy sales . As a sweeping ( at 800-plus pages ) epic about an Texan cattle drive , Frye suggests that while it seemed to be the conventional Western that many hoped McMurtry would finally pen , the author also relished creating a canvas that would take in not just Texas but all of the American frontier- with all due socio-historic contradictions present .
In Understanding Larry McMurtry , one comes to understand how McMurtry ’ s novels have been translated with such relative ease to other media , but Frye offers a convincing case that these are not disposable summer beach reads nor screenplays in the waiting . Certainly , McMurtry has long been — as he famously and semi-ironically referred to himself — more than a “ minor regionalist novelist .” McMurtry thus emerges as an ambitious author , with a vast oeuvre that both celebrates and interrogates the myths and mythos of the American West past and present .
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