Wordcraft – Cronin’s journey through apocalypse & back

The City of Mirrors

by Justin Cronin

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Is it any wonder Justin Cronin seemed like a man released from a long incarceration when he appeared last Friday night at the Dallas Museum of Art to discuss the release of the last book of his Passages trilogy, The City of Mirrors, with local book reviewer Joy Tipping? "I basically spent the last 10 years locked in a room," Cronin said, finishing what he termed the "2,000-page novel" that his three apocalyptic volumes -- The Passage, The Twelve, and The City of Mirrors comprise. 

“Does it have to be the last book?” Tipping asked, echoing the sentiments of the room full of fans, many of whom have followed him since the release of the first book in 2010.

“Yes, it does,” he said. Not that seeing publication of the final book of the series about a race of medically-induced vampires, the havoc they unleash on the world, and that world’s ultimate redemption (or not – no spoilers here) necessarily means the end of that world’s story.

“At some point, I think I’m going to write a book of stories associated with the narrative. In fact, I’m writing it now, very slowly, because my brain is dead right now,” he assured fans. Plus, there’s always the possibility of movies or, more to Cronin’s wish, TV series to look forward to.

In the meantime, the Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Houston’s Rice University had plenty to say about the trilogy’s Texas influences, the joys of writing genre fiction, and, yes, the thing he has for red-haired heroines. He didn’t start out as a writer of books garnering not only critical and popular acclaim but what were rumored to be multi-million dollar advances. After writing the  very literary, very grownup award-winning Mary and O’Neil and The Summer Guest in the early 2000’s, his daughter Iris, then in the third grade, dared him to write the book she wanted to read. One that should be about a girl who saved the world. And it had to have a character with red hair, “because she’s a redhead.”

Although he was currently writing another book, Cronin and his daughter passed stories about this world-saving, red-haired girl back and forth. When he typed his notes, it came to 30 single-spaced pages that “wow – looked a lot better than the thing I was writing…my agent and I sent it out under a pseudonym because it was so different.”

Different as in “genre” instead of his previous “literary” fiction.

“I don’t think genre is a bad term,” he told Tipping. “But there is a difference between work that is constructed mainly to entertain and a book meant to endure. The difference is in the depth of characters.” Such depth that he feels confident about filling that other volume he spoke about with the stories he developed around the characters, stories there simply wasn’t room for in the trilogy. And there are plenty of those, with the appendix to The City of Mirrors listing more than 60 named characters.

And how about those "really long books in which which a lot of people die," as Cronin described  his trilogy? "I read that Larry McMurtry was a big influence on you,” Tipping said.

Texas author Larry McMurtry’s magnum opus, Lonesome Dove, was a great influence, Cronin agreed. Schooled in the classic Iowa Writers Workshop format of short stories – “miniature works of despair,” as Cronin described them, McMurtry’s book about a massive 19^th century cattle drive and its correspondingly enormous cast of characters was a revelation.

On a plane trip, he met a Texan “blathering about this book,” who insisted on forcing it on him. “I read (it) on the plane, then lay in a hotel room for three days (still) reading it. I saw the virtues and the power of a really huge story.”

As well as the revelation that “a book could fall within an established genre and still be a wonderful book."

Adventure classics -- Don on the range

Lonesome Dove

by Larry McMurtry

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In Books: A Memoir, Texas author Larry McMurtry credits, perhaps quixotically, his first inkling of the characters of W. F. Call and Augustus “Gus” McCrae to his adolescent reading of a condensed version of Don Quijote.

I think Cervantes’ knight would be delighted by the comparison. Not that Gus McCrae is in all respects a legitimate son of the Don, who was anxious to be known as “the purest, chastest lover,” the prologue to his adventures assures us. Still, it isn’t hard to find the antecedents for McCrae’s rescue of golden-haired and golden-hearted prostitute Lorena in Quijote’s compulsive desire to rescue damsels.

Or to see in Cervantes’ parody of chivalrous adventure stories the forerunner of McMurtry’s professed attempt to demythologize the Old West.

“I thought of Lonesome Dove as a book that would demolish the myths,” McMurtry stated in an interview with Texas Monthly magazine. “But instead it just enhanced them.”

And like Cervantes, McMurtry would bow to public demand, writing sequels to his popular work. (In McMurtry’s case, a sequel and two prequels. Not to mention the spawning of multiple television miniseries -- not all authorized -- media events unfortunately not available to the seventeenth century Spanish author.)

For fear of getting too far ahead of things, here’s a brief summary of Lonesome Dove. Now growing old and settled down in South Texas, former Texas Rangers (of the law enforcement organization, not the baseball team), Call and McCrae are joined by another ex-Ranger, Jake Spoon, who is fleeing a murder charge. Spoon’s tales of his travels in
the new territory of Montana excite the normally phlegmatic Call to try his luck at ranching in the North.

Spoon’s romancing of the local settlement’s only prostitute, Lorena, stirs McCrae’s jealousy, if not his ambitions. And as soon as Call, McCrae and their motley crew of cowboys can steal a herd of longhorned cattle from a Mexican bandit, they’re off on one of the longest cattle drives in the history of Western fiction.

Along the way, they endure sandstorms, hail storms, and attacks by venomous snakes; ford innumerable rivers; and fight off attacks by renegades both white and Indian. Most of them die, including (sorry for the spoiler) McCrae. Which is why he had to be resurrected in the prequels Dead Man’s Walk and Commanche Moon.

In a reversal of the usual sequence of events, McMurtry originally sold the story as the script for the 1970’s movie The Streets of Laredo (later used as a title for the sequel novel). When the movie deal failed to get off the ground, he bought the script back and a decade later adapted it into the novel that won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1986. To
flesh out the story, McMurtry turned again to the Call-McCrae theme of dualism.

Multiple pairs of complementary characters -- “good” prostitute Lorena/”bad” prostitute Elmira, “good” black scout Joshua Deets/“bad” black outlaw Frog Lip, Indian renegade Blue Duck/white renegade Dan Suggs, faithless lover Jake Spoon/faithful lover Gus McCrae, and so on, give the novel a cast of epic proportions. I suggest this technique to any writer who needs a lot of characters fast.

The novel is now as entrenched in Texas mythology as Edna Ferber’s Giant, discussed last week. McMurtry himself, now also in old age, views it dispassionately.

“I wrote novel after novel,” he notes in Books. “Most were good. . . None, to my regret, were great, although my long Western Lonesome Dove was very popular -- the miniseries made from it was even more popular. Popularity, of course, is not the same as greatness.”

(Put his comment in perspective by noting he considers only two of the innumerable volumes his bookstores have sold to be great. One was by Sir Isaac Newton. Four centuries ago, perhaps even Cervantes worried less about greatness than about popularity.)

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics continues a June of stories about Texas and the Southwest with N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn. Yes, I promised it to you today, but McMurtry’s mythologizing has been preying on my mind. A member of the same Kiowa tribe as the renegade Indians of Lonesome Dove, Momaday also won a Pulitzer for his work.)

Wordcraft -- The late, great Archer City book sale

I came to the small North Texas town of Archer City, home of legendary writer Larry McMurtry, to witness something historic -- the sale of more than 300,000 books from McMurtry’s equally legendary bookstore, Booked Up, Inc. The store billed it as “the last booksale from the town that brought you The Last Picture Show.”

The couple ahead of me in the line to attend the auction were bidder number 150 and guest. I must have done a double take. Only 150 people showed up to buy this many books? From the man who wrote the Pulitzer-winning Lonesome Dove? Not to mention, of course, The Last Picture Show. And dozens more.

“We thought we’d be lucky to get a hundred,” one of the women handling the paperwork at the registration table said.

“Most people would want to register before an auction,” a second said severely.

The third jotted bid numbers on bid sheets for potential buyers, or stick-on labels with the letter “G” for non-buying guests, like me. Despite the enormous number of books, some editions worth thousands of dollars, the process had a casual air. This, after all, was the bookstore comprising four warehouse size buildings where bookworms had been left on their honor to carry their finds down the street to the sole building with a cashier.

And a sale where the auctioneer, after puzzling for a moment over McMurtry’s handwritten notes, could tell the audience he wasn’t sure whether the reserve price on a book was $100 or $600, but he’d give us the benefit of the doubt and start at the lower price.

I’d walked in during the sale of what McMurtry had listed as one hundred favorite books from his shelves, the ones sold individually instead of by the shelf. The auctioneer’s guess was probably right -- most had a reserve price of not more than a hundred dollars. To my surprise, several didn’t even meet the reserve, to remain unsold. Until the last.

The sale catalogue listed the final individual item without title or author, as only “a rare collection of erotica.” The auctioneer from the firm of Addison and Sarova added that the collection was assembled during the 1930’s and 1940’s by an unnamed Texas oilman, and contained original typescripts. “Mr. McMurtry,” he said, “wanted to find something special for this sale.”

It was. The bidding, which had become lethargic, livened. The volume’s reserve price was $750. It sold for $2,750. 

Downtown Archer City assumed the solemn-festive air of a wake for the sale, probably the largest commercial transaction to take place in the last century in the town with a population in the neighborhood of 1,850. Drivers at the single blinking red light on the corner deferred to each other with the courtesy usually extended to funeral processions. Cafes around the courthouse square stayed open beyond their normal lunchtime hours. Even the public library, usually closed on weekends, advertised it would open  Saturday, August 11, the final day of the sale, to offer internet connections and air conditioning for auction guests.

Despite earlier fears, McMurtry, age 76, announced he was only reducing his stock, not closing. Booked Up will remain in business, whittled down to a single building and a mere 150,000 or so volumes. For days and hours of operation, see its website, www.bookedupac.com/.