There’s a town in Texas, where nothing much happens other than the changing of the traffic lights. It could be any town, really, and it takes some while to figure out it’s Texas, but it doesn’t matter. It’s the time of the Korean war, life is changing across the country, and yet the only things to do are to go to the pool hall, the cafe, or the movie theatre. Or you can get laid.

On the surface, this is a novel about a place where absolutely nothing happens other than people trying to get into other people’s pants. You can leave (escape, really) if you join the military, but the horrible stasis of this life is captured in the Larry McMurtry’s classic writing. But there are undercurrents. Supposedly decent people are not decent at all. There is a hatred and fear of people that are different, or supposedly different.

Following the fortunes of several of the townsfolk and the situations they get themselves into, one gets the sense of a way of life slipping slowly away, never to return. With stasis comes innocence, a painful unwillingness to change, and yet change comes anyway. The book was described as humorous, but I didn’t find it so. There’s nothing much light about this story, and it’s actually quite depressing. Fortunately, it’s so well written and its characters so real that you can connect to them, and watch the demise of that time as surely as the old movie theater closes.