Just finished reading "Leaving Cheyenne" written by McMurtry when he was only 27, and his second book after "Horseman, Pass By" (from which the movie "Hud" was made.) Cheyenne" takes its name from an old cowboy song: My foots in the stirrup, My pony won't stand; Goodbye, old partner, I'm leaving Cheyenne.
The story centers around three main characters: two men and a women who share a love from childhood to the present. While the love depicted is more unorthodox than we're used to, it has a haunting bittersweetness that held my interest untill the end. A New York Times Reviewer wrote, If Chaucer were a Texan writing today, and only 27 years old, this is how he would have written and this is how he would have felt.
McMurtry's style is descriptive, his characters interesting, and the story never flags. The town of Thalia is later reproduced at length in his fourth novel, "The Last Picture Show," but in "...Cheyenne" it is just a minor blip in the landscape.
A couple of observations McMurtry's characters make are homespun and typical of the writer whose Texas background inhabits his "people." At one point a father tells his son that it's better to be rich than poor -- the boy says, "That ain't what the Bible says." Dad replies, I know there's fools in the world who say poverty is holy, but let them go without shoes some cold winter, like I did when I was a kid, and then see how holy they think it is. Being poor just makes people little and mean, most of the time. It's a damn degrading thing.
Another time talking about getting rid of a politician, a man says I wish there was some way to run him out of the country...that's the damn trouble with democracy. You got to wait around and vote, and then the people are so stupid they put scroungy sonsofbitches back in office. Sounds pretty familiar to me!
This was one of McMurtry's shorter books and well worth the read. One critic wrote, "McMurtry's style never turns melodramatic or sentimental." His love stories are never sugary or squalid, yet there is a resonance that runs through relationships that leaves the reader reflecting on what might have been.
