Larry McMurtry, leaving well enough alone

 Larry McMurtry tried to demythologize the West, but couldn't.

Larry McMurtry's passing is to be mourned, of course. At his best – The Last Picture Show, Leaving Cheyenne, All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers and, of course, Lonesome Dove – he was superb, one of the country's strongest, most honest writers.

His masterpiece, Lonesome Dove, an attempt to demythologize the American West, was breathtaking in scope and power. And he created an immortal character in Gus McRae. When McMurtry killed Gus off -- as he did to almost all his most beloved characters -- it was like a death in the family, and I wept like a child.

(Of course, he failed spectacularly at altering in any appreciable way our perceptions of the West. Instead, he added a cast of indelible characters to the myths permanently engraved on the national psyche.)

Sadly -- and I consider this an important qualifier -- he devalued much of his best work with ill-conceived and sub-par sequels.

That's only my opinion, of course. But after reading his sequel to The Last Picture Show, the excretable Texasville, I was deeply shocked. When I eagerly grabbed Some Can Whistle, the sequel to All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers, my favorite McMurtry work, I was bitterly disappointed, even angry, at how he portrayed Danny Deck in middle age.

And let's not even talk about the prequels and sequels to Lonesome Dove. A writer as talented as McMurtry should have known that what you leave out is just as important -- perhaps more important -- than what you keep in.

It makes me sad to admit -- and perhaps it's just a failing in myself -- that his attempts to continue his characters' stories have tainted my appreciation of the original novels. I feel cheated.

McMurtry at work in his Archer City bookstore.

I sound like an old grouch, but I liked and respected McMurtry. My friend Roy Appleton and I traveled to Archer City years ago to visit his bookstore, Booked Up, which once took up most of downtown. Seeing him at work in his office overlooking the bookstacks was an amazing experience.

One of the signs of greatness is the ability to surprise. And McMurtry's New York Times obituary told me something I never would have expected about the writer who was proud of his ranching heritage and spent most of his life in Texas.

He was a Stanford graduate school classmate of Ken Kesey (counterculture icon and leader of the Merry Pranksters), was briefly included in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (his classic take on the Pranksters' wild cross-country bus trek in the 1960s) and eventually married Kesey's widow.

He was, according to his writing partner, quite the ladies man. What could be more surprising than that?

Larry McMurtry: Ladies man?