Books, Arts & Manners: Laying Rubber

Cadillac Jack

By Larry McMurtry Simon & Schuster, 395 pp., $15.95 What I best remember from the year I lived in West Texas—even more than the dust storms—is how people could talk. One morning, for instance, a woman told me I looked “lower than a snake’s belly.” Talking is something Texans, like most Southerners, are especially good at. Larry McMurtry and most of his characters are Texans, and so it isn’t surprising that Cadillac Jack, like some of his other novels, is an aural orgy, a great juicy squeeze of bawdy, tangy speech.

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Thomas Mallon

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Cadillac Jack

By Larry McMurtry Simon & Schuster, 395 pp., $15.95 What I best remember from the year I lived in West Texas—even more than the dust storms—is how people could talk. One morning, for instance, a woman told me I looked “lower than a snake’s belly.” Talking is something Texans, like most Southerners, are especially good at. Larry McMurtry and most of his characters are Texans, and so it isn’t surprising that Cadillac Jack, like some of his other novels, is an aural orgy, a great juicy squeeze of bawdy, tangy speech.