Presidio: a novel
From some list, maybe the library’s recommendation? Looks like 2018 imprint. The first few pages really gripped me, such an evocative rendering of the plains of West Texas. Set in the early 1970’s, it’s that time when the world was both fresh, new, and old. Another recent recommendation was some Larry McMurtry mid-list novels, and that brought back recollections of that canon. Which, in turn seemed so familiar in Presidio.
It’s the details, the textures, the personalities in the high plains of West Texas, along that hard, New Mexico Line. I started reading McMurtry’s canon while I was in school in Arizona, and the tones, the language, made me homesick. There’s an old Robert Earl Keen song, with a lick about “On the plains of West Texas…”
Presidio: a novel
A car thief, like a more modern cattle rustler, and set in 1972, when life was different.
“He’s fine. We like to say he just got lost in thought one day and never found his way back out again.” Page 288.
Easy enough to hear in my mind’s eye, the laconic Texas drawl.
In the afterword, listed as an influence? McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show. Adds an elegiac tone, the death of the old west, and new west, clawing its way out of the dirt and soul of the people.
There is something about the land, the way it gets into a body’s sol and then, never lets go.
