Anything for Billy by Larry McMurtry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
McMurtry’s books have never disappointed me. I picked up this and another, ‘Buffalo Girls’, at a flea market last month, without any sense of when they’d been written, and simply tucked into them one after the other. They were a well-chosen pair, in that both novels are concerned with converting the histories of rather unpalatable people into characters in a story worth reading, but with greater honesty than the dime novels of the early 20th century.
In ‘Anything for Billy’, McMurtry’s narrator, Ben Sippy, is, himself, a dime novelist, and arguably the true protagonist of the tale McMurtry has spun from the real history of William Bonney. Sippy’s voice and vision, his sense and durability, and the depth of his own experience provide the narrative grist that allows detail, clarity and perspective in the telling of events. “Billy Bone”, himself, proves too simple and erratic to make sense of his own being. Billy’s other trail companion, Joe Lovelady, alternatively, is too steady and phlegmatic to lend his voice. Sippy’s story, however, arcs out of an escape from genteel circumstances in Philadelphia, to land, finally, on the west coast of southern California, the two coasts of the American continent being the only “parentheses” broad enough to encompass McMurtry’s West.
If this book interests you, I’d strongly recommend reading this review by Jack Butler in the New York Times back in 1988.