(2 of 2)
The static quality of the plot may be what limits the characterizations of the novel's two important women. Karla is vivid enough. She has taken to communicating by wearing T shirts printed with the titles of hillbilly songs (like You're the Reason Our Children Are Ugly, sung by Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty). More than halfway through the book, Duane notices her in a blank T shirt; her glum explanation is that she has nothing more to say. Then there is the onetime teen queen Jacy, over whom Duane and Sonny fought in high school. She has returned to Thalia after several marriages and a career as a movie star in Europe. She goes trolling for Duane, but he evades her, queasy about disturbing painful memories. That is a believably cowardly male response; McMurtry's women, of course, are implacable in pursuit of such pain. His insight ends here, however. He hints at alarming strength in both Karla and Jacy, but does not find ways to show its sources or workings-out.
The other important character from the early novel is Sonny, the shadowed, sensitive boy through whom the reader saw the dusty sadness of the worn-down little town. In Picture Show, Sonny had a love affair with Ruth, the wife of the cloddish football coach, but it was the self-absorbed Jacy he yearned after and with whom he tried to elope. Now he takes little notice of her return. His mind seems to be losing its hold on present time.
At first it is assumed that he is merely forgetful. Then he is discovered in the long-ago burned-out shell of Thalia's movie theater, sitting in one of the ) two remaining seats, staring into empty air. He is running old movies in his head. This scene of memory flooding out everything, overwhelming the present -- this last picture show -- is corny, stagy, shamelessly sentimental, the kind of thing only a storyteller given to shaggy exaggerations would try. The reader is inclined to think that McMurtry gets away with it.