In this masterful and often surprising sequel to the
acclaimed Duane's Depressed, the Pulitzer Prize-
and Oscar-winning author of Lonesome Dove has
written a haunting, elegiac, and occasionally erotic novel
about one of his most beloved characters. Duane Moore
first made his appearance in The Last Picture
Showand, like his author, he has aged but not lost his
vigor or his taste for life.
Back from a two-
week trip to Egypt, Duane finds he cannot readjust to life
in Thalia, the small, dusty, West Texas hometown in which
he has spent all of his life. In the short time he was
away, it seems that everything has changed alarmingly. His
office barely has a reason to exist now that his son
Dickie is running the company from Wichita Falls, his
lifelong friends seem to have suddenly grown old, his
familiar hangout, once a good old-fashioned convenience
store, has been transformed into an "Asian Wonder Deli,"
his daughters seem to have taken leave of their senses and
moved on to new and strange lives, and his own health is
at serious risk.
It's as if Duane cannot find
any solace or familiarity in Thalia and cannot even bring
himself to revisit the house he shared for decades with
his late wife, Karla, and their children and
grandchildren. He spends his days aimlessly riding his
bicycle
(already a sign of serious eccentricity in West
Texas) and living in his cabin outside town. The more he
tries to get back to the rhythm of his old life, the more
he realizes that he should have left Thalia long ago --
indeed everybody he cared for seems to have moved on
without him, to new lives or to death.
The only
consolation is meeting the young, attractive geologist,
Annie Cameron, whom Dickie has hired to work out of the
Thalia office. Annie is brazenly
seductive, yet oddly
cold, young enough to be Duane's daughter, or worse, and
Duane hasn't a clue how to handle her. He's also in love
with his psychiatrist, Honor Carmichael, who after years
of rebuffing him, has decided to undertake what she feels
is Duane's very necessary sex reeducation, opening him up
to some major, life-changing surprises.
For the
lesson of When the Light Goes is that where there's
life, there is indeed hope -- Duane, widowed, displaced
from whatever is left of his own life, suddenly rootless
in the middle of his own hometown, and at risk of death
from a heart that also doesn't seem to be doing its job,
is in the end saved by sex, by love, and by his own
compassionate and intense interest in other people and the
surprises they reveal.
At once realistic and
life-loving, often hilariously funny, and always moving,
though without a touch of sentimentality, Larry McMurtry
has opened up a new chapter in Duane's life and, in doing
so, written one of his finest and most compelling novels
to date, doing for Duane what he did so triumphantly for
Aurora in Terms of Endearment.
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