In an interview on Texas

Next on your list, Larry McMurtry might be better known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove. Why did you select his 1966 novel about a North Texas town, The Last Picture Show?

The Last Picture Show captures the adolescent energy that epitomised the state in the second half of the 20th century, when Texas was taking off in people’s imaginations. It takes place in 1951, on the eve of a real explosion in car culture and as the state is about to really come into its own. That reckless adolescent energy, which McMurtry wrote into the book, just speaks to the state at that time, in my opinion. It’s about best friends and a girl that comes between them in this little town called Thalia. At the beginning of the book, these boys have just played their last game of high-school football. It’s time for them to move but there is nowhere for them to go so they just roll around like tumbleweed.

Do we learn anything about Texas from reading this book?

One of the things that he’s able to do is to draw a vivid picture of this dusty rural North Texas town. He does a beautiful job of juxtaposing the claustrophobia of small Texas towns with the wide-open spaces of rural Texas.

Does this world that McMurtry was writing about still exist?

When I drive through Texas now I find that the places which once might’ve been like Thalia have disappeared or been swallowed up by surrounding sprawl. They’ve thrown up a bunch of Walmarts and Starbucks. Now they look like anywhere, instead of what they once were. And those small-town theatres that McMurtry made the centrepiece of The Last Picture Show? Everyone knows they’ve been replaced by megaplexes.