SIRONIA, TEXAS (1,731 pp.)Mad/son CooperHoughton Mifflin ($10).
Time was, in Texas, when a man didn't have anything big to say that a shooting iron couldn't say better; but those days seem gone forever. In the last 30 years, a cloud of literary and artistic activity has been gathering over the Southwest, and in the last ten days it has grown large enough to look like the beginnings of a regional renaissance.
One of the newest novelists to arrive on the Texas landscape is Madison Cooper of Wacoand he has come in like an oil well and come in big. Novelist Cooper is crude,...