Book Review

By Derryll White

Wright, Lawrence (2023).  Mr. Texas.

“A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy, educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership.”    – Chinua Achebe

Anyone interested in how our 21st Century functions will benefit from reading this novel?  As Chinua Achebe says, democracy requires a healthy and educated group of participants.  Lawrence Wright boils down the sickness that is partisan politics and, like the fracking he discusses, injects the distillation into the Texas House of Representatives.  It could just as easily be the B.C. Legislature or the national House of Commons.  The dysfunction is clear from the beginning.

Sonny Lamb is a neophyte rancher thrown into the hardest winner-take-all, game in town.  It is a fascinating journey to follow the inexperienced cattleman through the maze of urbane lobbyists, veteran politicians, perverted wealth and power mongers, and family demands.  The author lays out a large canvas but keeps it all real.  The reader will continually weigh his or her own morals against the compromises Sonny crafts.

Texas is large but some of the characters, such as Speaker Big Bob Bigbee, seem larger.

Wright does not spare the issues – homosexual rights, abortion, pollution, misappropriation of public funds – he throws them all into the hopper.  Then he adds the Christian Conservatives.

If a reader is bold enough to have questions about democracy, about who is served with this political construct, then ‘Mr. Texas’ is the novel to read. Lawrence Wright does a great job of exposing it all.

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Excerpts from the novel:

MANAGING – Lightning danced all around, landing like mortar shells, reminding Sonny of Iraq, but he couldn’t think about that now.  He had learned that much from war, you set some thoughts aside to be pondered when you were alone and safe.  Or maybe you never revisited those thoughts at all, you just put them in a casket and buried them, along with friends now gone.  The job was to live.

WEST TEXAS – Some summer days you could set a pot of beans in the noonday sun and they’d be cooked by suppertime.  Then winter came and you felt the breath of Manitoba crawl down your neck.  L.D. had seen blizzards that buried cattle alive.  It was a mystery to him why people would spend their lives in such a forlorn and godforsaken place, unless there were fortunes to be made, but that prospect had long since passed on.

WAR DEATHS – All those white crosses, as far as you could see, the finest people, slaughtered because of their best qualities, their courage, their loyalty, their patriotism, rolled over by merciless history.

TEXAS – “Texas is in trouble.  There’s a lot of good in it.  Wonderful people.  But it’s like a family with a bad gene.  A crazy-making gene that turns some folks into fanatics.  You can’t reach them, but if you let them take over we’re sunk.  God knows how far they’d go, with the guns, the heartlessness around health care and gays and stuff.  The way we treat kids in our custody.  A whole lot of people in high positions know the danger we’re in but they’re afraid to step up.  Afraid of being targeted.  Hell, it’s the same all over the country.  Texas has spread everywhere.”

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

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