The Last Picture Show is one of the "Thalia novels," the first two of which are Horseman, Pass By (1961) and Leaving Cheyenne (1963). The novel was followed in 1987 by a sequel, Texasville, which recounted the lives of the main characters, and some of the collateral characters, as well as introducing new ones. In Texasville, Duane is a once-wealthy oil man now losing his shirt in the mid-1980s oil bust; with big house and trappings, he seems disconcertingly like Frank Farrow, Jacy's father, in the earlier novel. Sonny is losing his mind; Jacy is an actress with a thoroughly unhappy life. Ruth Popper seems the only happy person in the novel, running for her health every day and seeming to have accepted what her life had to give her. The characters seem, as middle-aged adults dealing with contemporary problems such as mental illness, the oil bust, and...