From Depression to Wisdom

DUANE’S DEPRESSED; by Larry McMurtry; Simon & Schuster: $26, 432 pages

One day when he’s 62, oilman Duane Moore, who was a youth in “The Last Picture Show” and middle-aged in “Texasville,” suddenly realizes that he’s tired of spending his life in the cabs of pickup trucks. He starts going everywhere on foot. This frightens his wife of 40 years, Karla, who considers Duane the rock of sanity in a household of four children and nine grandchildren, drug addictions, divorces and constant alarms. Does he want a divorce himself, finally? Has he gone crazy?

Duane can’t understand all the fuss. He wants to retire, simplify his life, get some healthy exercise, sit in a little cabin on his property, gaze out over the mesquite flats of West Texas and think. But his wife and his neighbors in the town of Thalia know him better than he knows himself. Duane’s walking proves, indeed, to be a sign of profound disturbance.

Larry McMurtry had a well-publicized bout of depression while working on “Streets of Laredo,” the sequel to “Lonesome Dove.” Rather than write about the experience directly, as William Styron did in “Darkness Visible,” he uses it here to conclude the Thalia trilogy on an elegiac note--yet with plenty of comedy mixed in, and in prose as casual and baggy as an old pair of jeans.

Though “Duane’s Depressed” stands on its own, it helps to have read the first two novels. Once vital and lusty characters have aged into eccentrics; old feuds and love affairs have faded--and properly so, McMurtry indicates. The past is a trap. Duane’s friend and rival, Sonny Crawford, never got over local beauty Jacy Farrow; now he sits immobile in the convenience store he owns, feet blackening with gangrene. Sonny, too, is depressed--Duane starts to recognize depression everywhere. But why is he depressed, when it seems that he has successfully outrun the past?

“It may be nothing more dramatic than that you’ve suddenly realized you’re getting old--and don’t like it,” says Honor Carmichael, daughter of one of the eccentrics, now a psychiatrist in Wichita Falls. Duane has hiked 18 miles from Thalia to see her. He discovers that he hasn’t outrun the past after all, merely carried it on his back, and finally he is collapsing under the burden. He takes a room in a cheap motel, among drug dealers and prostitutes, where he sleeps and watches TV and lives only for the next hour he will spend talking to Honor.

McMurtry nicely describes the beginning of therapy: the initial shame and reluctance; the rush of relief at finding a sympathetic listener; the panic when the first hour ends and the pain is undiminished; the doubt that one can survive long enough for the treatment to work; the imaginary conversations with the therapist between appointments; the kicking-in of transference (Duane duly falls in love with Honor, though she’s a lesbian); the mounting horror at how much it’s all going to cost.

Meanwhile, without Duane’s steadying influence, his family, surprisingly, becomes a lot less dysfunctional. Son Dickie, out of drug rehab for the third time, takes over the family oil business and makes a go of it. Daughters Julie and Nellie stop marrying lowlifes and find rich, respectable boyfriends. Son Jack is happy out in the boonies trapping wild pigs.

“Here you are getting crazier by the day just as your kids are finally shaping up,” says Bobby Lee, another eccentric who broods constantly over the loss of one of his testicles to cancer. “I guess you must have been inhibiting them with your good behavior or something.”

Duane reflects: “He was paying a trained psychiatrist $190 an hour to figure him out, and now Bobby Lee, who had never set foot in a college classroom, felt free to pop off about what had been the matter with his children all these years. What was even more irritating was that the comment might be more or less true.”

Karla’s death in a car crash interrupts the therapy. Grief takes precedence over angst. Duane finds solace planting a memorial garden and giving the produce to anyone who will pick it. At Honor’s urging, he spends a year reading Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past”--the ultimate chronicle of human disappointment, she says--and gets something out of it, though it’s a tough slog. As he imagines Karla telling him: “The only long book you ever read was ‘Lonesome Dove,’ and if the miniseries had been on first you wouldn’t have read that one either.”

Like Duane, we emerge from our reading with the thought that we have got something--glimpses, here and there, of what might be wisdom. American literature has never had much truck with wisdom--only with the “road of excess” that William Blake claimed would lead us to it. So we have no end-of-road novels, excesses galore. This book is different. In its modest, ramshackle, aw-shucks way, it feels like a destination.