The unexamined life

There are other writers who use Dallas as a setting, exploring our fine city as a character. Two that come immediately to mind are Harry Hunsicker and Will Clarke.

McMurtry's other Houston novel is All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers.

Still, it seems that rural Texas, Austin, Fort Worth, and the border country have more novels than Houston or Dallas. It seems a shame in Houston, which is such a rich, eccentric place.

It's been several years since I've read one of David Lindsey's novels and I'd forgotten all about them. I had high hopes for him after finding his A Cold Mind back in 1983(I still have that first edition on my shelves someplace) but I eventually lost interest in his work.

Thanks for the heads-up about Antonya Nelson's work...I'll be sure to take a look at Some Fun.

Actually, Houston has fared better than Dallas to a degree. There are all of McMurtry's "city" novels -- not just Terms and Moving On, there's a third, I believe. There's also one of the finest 'true-crime' non-fiction novels ever written, Tommy Thompson's Blood and Money. His laconic, almost melancholy line about the city -- "There's so little reason for Houston" -- has stuck with me the way Wills' line about Dallas has.

I'm not a big fan of David Lindsey's thrillers, but they're better and better-known than anything comparable in Dallas. Houston has a much better literary scene than Dallas does -- thanks to the University of Houston's highly regarded MFA writing program (the Dallas area doesn't have a graduate creative writing program, really), Rice University's liberal arts rep and that literary foundation down there, In Print, which is pretty amazing when it comes to funding book stuff. Partly as a result, Houston has popped up in quite a few high-quality short stories -- from a couple of stories by Donald Barthelme (he grew up there, lived there while running the U of H program toward the end of his life) to an increasing number of stories by Antonya Nelson, who lives there half the year but will soon be moving their full-time (check out her new collection, Some Fun, at least two are set in Houston, if I recall correctly). Perhaps Nick Flynn, who teaches at the U of H and who wrote the wonderfully titled memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (set in Boston, unfortunately), will write about Houston.

And that's off the top of my head, and that's from someone who doesn't claim to have anything like an encyclopedic knowledge of Texas lit.

Thanks for writing.

Just curious...do you think that Houston has fared any better than Dallas in this regard? I can recall Larry McMurtry's "Moving On" and June Arnold's "Baby Houston" but no others come to mind at the moment other than McMurtry's "Terms of Endearment" and its sequel.

On the other hand, at least Houston and Dallas don't seem to have been thrashed the way that Joyce Carol Oates and Mary Karr have done that to the Beaumont-Port Arthur part of the state.