Texas novelist Larry McMurtry knows that the reading public will sit up and listen to whatever he says now since the publication of his Pulitzer Prize-winning western epic Lonesome Dove. In his newest creation, Anything for Billy, he has again consorted with leathery cowboy legend, this time the gunfighter myths surrounding Billy the Kid. At the same time, in keeping his public vows never to write the same novel twice, he has clambered up onto new and strange terrain.
Anything for Billy presents the Kid as a "young, short, dirty, ugly and violent" killer knowing neither fear nor pity. Nothing new or unique in that portrait. But the Kid is surrounded by a wild, woolly, weird, and unlikely cast of characters, only a few of whom bear a glancing resemblance to real historical persons. But story--not history--is McMurtry's chief concern here. The entire saga is narrated by aging dime novelist Benjamin Sippy, and indeed, on the surface at least, this novel's fast-paced recounting of beddings and blood-lettings, its two-page chapters and cliff-hanger endings, recall the format of late nineteenth-century dime novels.
For all its blood-and-guts reminders of pulp fiction, however, Anything for Billy is a thoughtfully conceived work and worthy of exploration. To flesh out the novel's contents and implications in some depth, THE WORLD & I presents commentaries on the book from three experts. First, film historian Don Graham profiles McMurtry and tells the significance of Anything for Billy in the context of the novelist's entire career (p.326). There have been myriad fictional versions of the kid legend, and these form the backdrop in historian Stephen Tatum's account of Anything for Billy's unique postmodern texture (p. 333).
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