More of the Wright Stuff
Mr. Texas
By Lawrence Wright
New York: Knopf, 2023.
322 pp. $29 Hardcover.
Reviewed by
John Perryman
Lawrence Wright has written another fascinating book, this time a novel on Texas politics. The talented author of celebrated works detailing the birth and rise of Al-Quada (The Looming Tower, which won a Pulitzer) and the history of Scientology (Going Clear) turns to satire in his latest effort, Mr. Texas. Full of humor, spot-on political analysis, attention to detail that only a long-time resident could muster, and even a touch of melancholy, Mr. Texas delivers the goods. The novel might be read as a sort of companion piece to Wright’s God Save Texas, a tour of the state’s history and politics, which was part memoir and part journalism—but rendering in fiction allows Wright to dramatize and flesh out many topics he only briefly explored in that earlier book. Indeed, part of the fun is reading the novel’s dialogue and hearing Texas voices debate the past, give voice to concerns, and haggle over policies. Wright gets the local idiom and mannerisms correct. Mr. Texas is a must-read for those who want to better understand the state and for Texans who love their home but often find it hard to explain to others exactly why.
Straight out of the chute, the reader is thrown into a quintessentially Texas landscape; in the first paragraph, readers are introduced to a terrain full of caliche roads, mesquite trees, and pump jacks. As Wright notes, this is a world dismissed by many as flyover country, and to his credit, he populates it with characters you care about and sympathize with (and some you don’t). The countryside may appear to be dead and empty, but the language and locals’ names are lively and full of verve; characters with names such as Lurleen, Mary Margaret, Hector, and one especially memorable rancher named Mamie, confess things like, “I guess my kinfolk believed the land was resilient…. Or maybe they were just freebooters looking for the loot and out the door they go” while another swears “Gambling debts are debts of honor” and an ornery auctioneer barks at a bidder, “Six [thousand] from the cowgirl in the back who ain’t got her head screwed on today.”
Through this spare Presidio County setting, cynical lobbyist and political operative extraordinaire L.D. Sparks drives his low-slung Lincoln to deceased state representative Walter Dunne’s funeral, entering a church, readers learn, for the first time since the Nixon administration. And though Sparks might wear “the garments of the country squire, via Orvis and LL Bean, and could speak the lingo with native ease, [he] didn’t care for the territory.” His instinct tells him he should act quickly to find a replacement, and as luck would have it, he seems to stumble upon a stooge while on his trip west, plucking Sonny Lamb, one of the obscure locals “marooned by history” and sentenced to dwell in this desperate wasteland, to step into Dunne’s post.
Sonny is a loveable loser with a lantern jaw, yet he was fortunate enough to marry up and into the clan of his high school sweetheart, who are a few tax brackets higher than his own, a fact of which Sonny is often reminded. Lola is a tough, sweet, and eminently likeable woman. She knows her rancher-husband has talents others do not recognize, but she is still skeptical of Sparks’s smooth talk (and indeed Sonny at one point concedes she’d be the better candidate). Sonny’s life has been a series of good intentions, missed opportunities, and failed rolls of the die. Though he and Lola love each other, they have hit a rough patch in their relationship, a situation compounded by a drought that has forced Sonny’s financial hand. The day of Dunne’s funeral, the hapless Sonny has put his prize bull up for sale at auction and then sentimentally bought it back, much to the dismay of his own mother Doris, a fierce and independent divorcee, who witnesses the embarrassing purchase and who doesn’t hesitate to spit hard truths from her sun-leathered lips.
Though money-making may not be in Sonny’s blood, decency, common sense and military discipline are, and when a neighbor’s barn catches fire the evening after Dunne’s funeral, the decorated Iraq vet springs into action and rescues a young girl and her beloved horse. The local nightly news captures the heroics. And so a mere few hours after Dunne has been dispatched to his heavenly reward, Sparks—sipping a beer at a local watering hole—watches the story break on the big screen before him. The next morning, his Lincoln rolls slowly down a long driveway and pulls up before Sonny’s house as he closes in on his prey. Exactly one slick conversation later, the plot is set into motion. Sparks's sales pitch launches both an improbable political career and a tried-and-true literary trope: young man from the province journeys to the capital city.
Happily, this political naif proves not to be quite the pawn Sparks expected—he is no lamb being led to slaughter. Though he stumbles plenty, Sonny gets his legs under him with a water bill that promises to address the drought in West Texas by building a desalination plant for the region’s brackish aquifer. The affable staff assembled for him takes to his project. They themselves represent a sort of cross section of many of the hot-button issues of the day, and though they do not always agree with Sonny, they recognize he is a decent man. Quickly, perhaps improbably quickly, this team finds itself assisting the bumbling but well-intentioned Sonny in his efforts to navigate his water bill through a divided state house.
As a journalist, Wright has covered Austin for years, and he skillfully introduces readers to how the grinder that is Texas politics turns out the local sausage. The weirdness of Budget Night jumps to life as staffers hurry through the capitol’s marble halls, campaigning for bills while draining margaritas. Sharply drawn characters throw elbows in pursuit of committee assignments and debate fracking, water concerns, gender issues, the wars overseas, opioids, and abortion. One colleague tells Sonny he will not hear her say lobbyists are “all bad”—elaborating that the “system is too complicated for ordinary people to thread the needle. Lobbyists are needed to tell your story.” Sonny listens and learns. By nature a moderate who skews center right, he grows from his exposure to his staff and Austin, but he never fully abandons his core beliefs, which is to Wright’s credit and puts the novel in rare company with other quality works of art that don’t condescend to the rural South: Ben Fountain’s novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and Robert Duvall’s film The Apostle come most quickly to mind.
Character types, who in less skilled hands might flatten into two dimensions or swell into caricature, find suitable complexity when sketched by Wright’s pen—despite all their Second Amendment bluster and Texas hair. There are even a few real persons thrown into the mix (current Governor Abbott) and another, Big Bob Bigbee, who bears more than a passing resemblance to the legendary and now deceased former Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock. Interestingly, perhaps no one emerges as more sympathetic or realistic than Lurleen Klump, Baylor grad and “Tea Party doyenne,” whose accessories of choice include turquoise and more turquoise, but who—come tale’s end—just might have a surprise up the sleeve of her tailored western blouse.
Ultimately the novel is a love story—between Sonny and Lola in their heroic attempt to save their marriage, but perhaps even more so between Wright and the state he can’t quite figure out, gets repeatedly frustrated with, yet can’t help himself from writing about and seems ultimately to love. Readers of this novel, from both sides of the aisle, will no doubt be reminded why they love the state, too.
John Perryman is a fifth-generation Texan and an AmeriCorps Alum. He is the author of the short story collections Blood for Ghosts and Wait at Wood’s Edge, and his fiction, poetry, and criticism have appeared in The Southern Humanities Review, The South Carolina Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Concho River Review, and elsewhere.