Horseman, Pass By by Larry McMurtry

Before Lonesome Dove and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, before about 30 other novels, before Brokeback Mountain and more than 40 other screenplays, Larry McMurtry wrote Horseman, Pass By , his first novel. And it is one of his best.

The time is 1954; the place is a ranch outside the fictional town of Thalia, near Wichita Falls (a stand-in for Archer City, McMurtry's home town); the narrator is Lonnie, a 17-year-old trying to find the man he will turn out to be. Three people loom large in his life: Homer Brannon, his 80-year-old grandfather, an old-time, hard-working rancher dedicated to his land and his cattle; Halmea, the black cook, both a mother-figure for him and an object of his teenage lust; and Hud, the grandfather's stepson, a first-class SOB (no other way to say it) dedicated to money and chasing women.

Many very bad things happen in this novel, beginning with the dreaded threat of hoof-and-mouth disease, which could mean that all the carefully-bred cattle will have to be slaughtered, essentially bringing an end to the grandfather's way of life. And that's not the worst.

What saves this book from being just an incredibly sad tale of the demise of the Old West is the lack of romanticism in character portrayal, the authenticity of the dialogue for the time and place, and the lyrical poetry of the language in describing the landscape. It all feels so real that one can only assume that, while the story details are probably fictitious, the yearnings of the young Lonnie must have been those of the young McMurtry.

Just a note about the movie Hud, which was made from this book--it starred Paul Newman as Hud Bannon, and he was so magnetic, so sexy (for those older readers who remember him), that the focus of the movie necessarily shifted to his story, his motivations. Don't expect that from this book. Also, in the movie the character Halmea was switched to a white character, Alma. They didn't want to tackle the race-relation angle in the 1960s, I suppose.

Highly recommended, particularly for Texans.