Fiction review: Rhino Rancy

FICTION When rhinos come to Texas, you know the world is ending. Or at least it might mark the end of Larry McMurtry's long career as a novelist.

The 73-year-old author of "Lonesome Dove" recently announced that "Rhino Ranch," would be his last novel. It's also the fifth and final installment of a series that McMurtry launched 43 years ago with "The Last Picture Show."

Fonzie jumped the shark, and Indiana Jones nuked the fridge. Is it time for a new catchphrase to suggest it's curtains for a series?

Cue the rhinos, anyone?

The rhino ranch is the brainchild of K.K. Slater, a brash, larger-than-life billionaire. Here's McMurtry's description of her: "[S]he was six two, fifty-two years old, preferred to dress as a cowboy and flew her own planes, which included a Cessna and three helicopters. It was said she brooked no opposition, and suffered fools not at all. She had been brought up in the feudal manner on a very large ranch and was thought to have the habit of command."

The residents of Thalia -- "a mean, miserable little oil patch town," according to one resident -- initially don't cotton to the idea of a rhino ranch, but they wouldn't have reacted any better if Slater had opened a dude ranch for rich Northerners. They don't like strangers unless they're wearing cowboy boots and driving a pickup truck, and even then they're suspicious.

Besides, as the locals soon discover, rhinos aren't all that different from cattle, aside from their ability to flip a patrol car as if it were a pebble on the road.

The rhino ranch is still in its infancy as the novel opens, though, and in addition to offering a haven to the endangered species, Slater understands she needs to bill it as a tourist attraction. So representatives approach her neighbor, Duane Moore, about buying his land. His property, she reasons, would offer tourists a good vantage point for rhino spotting. But he isn't willing to sell.

Moore, the series' star since his appearance as a love-struck teenager in "The Last Picture Show," has experienced highs and lows across the decades, as has his boom-or-bust hometown. But now he's facing something new: old age. And he's not taking it well.

His first wife is dead, and his second wife is about to leave him. And with his son in charge of his oil-drilling company, there's not much for Moore to do except take walks with an old rhino that seems to like him. And even the rhino is inconstant, often lighting out for the Territory and leaving Moore on his own.

Sound depressing? It's not. McMurtry keeps the narrative moving at a good clip with snappy dialogue and chapters that almost never run to three pages long. It's effortlessly entertaining. Of course, it's not as ambitious as some of his earlier novels, but it's a respectable conclusion to a long-lived series.

That won't lift the spirits of fans who have followed McMurtry's career through 30 novels and understandably don't want the run to end. But if a herd of rhinos can't drag him back, what will?

Doug Childers is a Richmond writer and edits WAG, a literary Web site at http://www.thewag.net.