Lawrence Wright on “Mr. Texas” and What Makes Texas Special

Lawrence Wright on “Mr. Texas” and What Makes Texas Special https://ift.tt/QgEW2AO

Lawrence Wright is sitting in his home in Austin. In the background, I can see the warmly toned wall and the beginnings of an angled roof reaching toward a peak off-screen. The partial desk behind him is dark wood and has cloth-bound books on the shelves and notes on the desk. Behind him light trickles in through dark wood shutters. The room looks like a refuge from the still sweltering heat of the Texas September sun. 

Lawrence sits in his office chair, wearing a white shirt from The Trail Foundation, a local organization that works to maintain, enhance, and increase access to the Ann and Roy Butler Hike-and-Bike Trail. We are meeting today over Zoom to discuss his most recent novel, Mr. Texas. 

Mr. Texas is the latest from Lawrence Wright, a Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author. Sharply drawn and hilarious, Mr. Texas captures the outlandish reality of politics in Texas. The novel follows the story of Sonny Lamb, a somewhat ineffectual rancher out of West Texas who unexpectedly ends up with a career in the Texas House of Representatives. As Sonny navigates the political landscape, he must balance his personal ethics and environmental concerns with the pressures of veteran politicians, savvy lobbyists, and his own party. Lawrence Wright crafts a witty roller-coaster ride as Sonny attempts to reconcile his marriage and morality with his turbulent professional life in the Lone Star State.

I’m getting my PhD in English at Rice University in Houston. One of my colleagues is from South Africa, and when he was on the flight over to Texas for the first time he picked up God Save Texas to try and learn a bit more about this place he was going to be living in. He read it and then recommended I read it, which I finally did. So that was my first introduction to you and your work. Mr. Texas was a really great and fun read and I’m excited to chat about it more with you.

This semester I am teaching a course entitled The Cultural Imagination of Texas. Many of my students have expressed to me concern and interest about the state of politics in Texas. They are new voters, having just come of age, and want to learn more, so my first question is built off the conversations I’ve had with my students. What can this younger generation of Texans and non-Texans take from Mr. Texas?

Well, first of all, I love the title of your course. I think this sounds like a lot of fun and very for our state because we have a big imagination when it comes to Texas culture, and I think we live partly in that imaginary Texas and partly in a real one. There’s a division in Texas that’s more striking than anywhere else in the United States. 

Anyway, I wrote Mr. Texas with the idea that it would penetrate into the heart of our political system and show us what we have, what’s good about it, and what’s wrong with it. And I wanted to make it as impartial as possible so that it offends everybody equally. And I think this is true of many Texans, as much as we may hate some of the political figures in our state and the politics that they inflict on the state, Texans tend to cherish characters. And there are a lot of characters in our political system and in the history of our political system. It’s just a huge amount of lore that I felt I could draw upon as a writer. It was just a rich trove to dig in.

Yeah, I think that you’ve done a really good job with offending both sides equally, I’ll say, but in a good way. It was nice. It was refreshing. I felt like an honest, if not exaggerated, portrayal of these things. But I mean, how can book about Texas politics not also be exaggerated and larger than life?

Well, let me take issue with the idea of it being exaggerated. I’m always stunned at how far into lunacy our political system will go. The character Big Bob is a kinship of Bob Bullock, who was the lieutenant governor. Big Bob is not nearly as crazy as the real Big Bob was. And so I think it’s shocking to read it, but if you hold it up to the light and compare it to some of the real life figures, it stands. I remember when I first started this. Back then I had Mike Martin as a character, and Mike Martin was a legislator from Longview who had himself shot in order to get the sympathy vote. The Texas Rangers went after him for fraud and they found him hiding in his mother’s stereo cabinet. Molly Ivans said in response to this real-life incident, “he always did want to be the speaker.” When that first version went around as a Hollywood script, they didn’t believe it. And I thought, well, you just can’t exaggerate. You cannot get too far out when you’re talking about Texas politics.

It’s really interesting you talk about how Texans love characters. I just taught a chapter from On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed. In that chapter, Gordon-Reed says that Texas is a white man. For her, there’s the rancher, the oilman, the cowboy, and then there’s the plantation owner. Your book seems to have these characters and a few others. It really seemed to me to be in the vein of Billy Lee Brammer’s The Gay Place. I was wondering if you could talk more about this.

Well, when I first moved to Austin, which was in 1980, The Gay Place was the only political novel people could point to, and this is the capital of Texas. There was very little written about Texas politics, a state that not only spun off Lyndon B. Johnson, but all these other fabulous figures, Anne Richards and Sam Rayburn, just a ton of fascinating consequential personalities.

But there were books that were more influential for me. Willie Morris, who was the editor of the Daily Texan when he was at UT and then became the editor of The Atlantic, wrote a memoir called North Towards Home, which has a lot in there about Texas. And I very strongly identified with that. But when I wrote about the Kennedy assassination 20 years later for Texas Monthly, which led to a memoir called In The New World, I felt like I was writing it from North Pole. I mean, there was nothing to refer to. I thought if I had grown up in Paris or Brooklyn, there would be so many things that would be identifiers of who I am. I mean, literature gives us that. It does.

We live in a community and the commentary that art provides is a way of finding yourself. And I think that was one of the problems that Texas had is that it didn’t have a central identity. It had these myths, but the reflective understanding of your culture that art provides was in such diminished form that there was very little to nibble on. And I recognized when the book came out and how hungry Texans were for that kind of reification. And I walked away from that audience in a way. I just didn’t want to be seen as a regional writer. But years later, when the editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, asked me to explain Texas because nobody understands why I would live here and write for The New Yorker, I decided it was time for me to take a look at it again.

Is that what led to your article “America’s Future is Texas” for The New Yorker?

Yeah, I had a great time doing that. And I had been living in the state, but not writing about it for 30 years, and suddenly I had a chance to write about something that was dear to me and problematic at the same time. And I guess that those contrary emotions are reflected in everything I write about Texas.

Yeah, I totally agree. In the acknowledgments of Mr. Texas you share that it had been rewritten and reframed over the years as the politics of Texas have changed and that, in many ways, it’s been a very live document. And so I’m wondering if you had to project, if you had to guess, what would Mr. Texas look like if you were to rewrite it again in 15 or 20 years?

Well, it was about that long ago that I started working on various iterations of this project. Back then Ann Richards was governor and both houses of the legislature were Democratic. And then Bush got elected and still he had a Democrat Lieutenant Governor and Speaker of the House. And then everything changed, and pretty quickly, it solidified as red as it had been blue for such a long time. My hope is that it’ll become a mixed political state. I think it’s a healthier state of politics when you have a balance in the legislature and in the governor’s mansion.

I would like to think that the demographics change the state. We’re already a majority minority state. We have four of the top ten most populous cities in America. Unbelievable to think about that. So Texas is an urban state and it’s a majority non-white state. Those are the most compelling demographic changes that are underway right now in Texas, and they’re going to have profound political consequences. So I would expect that Texas will look a lot more blue. And there are two big changes that will come from this, I think. 

One is that our politics right now in Texas are marked by the absence of compassion. This is so striking to me. We’re a rich state, and yet we have these alarming mortality rates for minorities and for mothers and so on. They are among the worst in the nation. By 2050 we are projected to be nearly as large as California and New York combined. So American politics will be Texas. It is already headed in that direction now, but time will solidify that. And are we ready for that? No, I don’t think we are at all. We’re not ready. And that’s a failure on our part.

This makes me think about how the novel concludes. At the end of the novel, things are left open and unresolved. So I was wondering, maybe without giving too much away for readers, what led you to that ending? Did that change over the years as well?

Well, this novel is not a fairytale. Everything doesn’t turn out great in the end, but I feel somewhat optimistic about the future of Texas. And so the ending is about the fact that Texas is at a pivot point. It is always changing, it is always evolving. But what Texas will be in the terms that we’ve been talking about is yet to be determined. It can go any direction. And I think it’s important for Texans to realize that what happens in Texas is not just about us. We are determining the future of America, and the future of America is the future of the whole world. So we have to be assiduous and serious about creating a culture that is worthy of that burden. And right now we’re paying very little attention to the consequences of our actions.

I want to transition here a little bit. I have this question here that I was nursing throughout my reading of your book — I couldn’t pin down who Mr. Texas was. So, who actually is Mr. Texas? Or, is the ambiguity kind of the point?

There’s a scene where there’s a young filmmaker who does a political ad for L.D. that features the Alamo, Sonny, Cowboy heroes, and all the Texas tropes that come with that imagery. So the concept in that is that Mr. Texas is a construct of this documentarian, this filmmaker’s imagination, and she’s drawing on the myths of Texas. And yet she is using a drone to manufacture this rather artificial creature that they have created for this political ad. They dressed up Sonny in the clothes of this figure. That’s who Mr. Texas is. It’s not Sonny, exactly. It’s what they make of him. It’s the archetype that they’re trying to create. And that’s what I think of if you ask me who Mr. Texas is. It is the creature that’s in the mind of the political ad maker.

I love that, actually. What’s the thing you want readers most to take away from Mr. Texas? What are your best hopes for this novel?

Well, I want, and this is going to sound a little soapy, but I want people to cherish the state. It is precious in many ways, and as retrograde as it can be, it’s still a fascinating place when we think about politics and wonder what is a city for? What is a state for? I think there are two things. One is to create opportunity and the other is to create community. And when you look at opportunity, Texas has done an amazing job. But in terms of creating community, we’re doing the opposite.

We’re dividing communities. And that’s sinister. It’s not just a waste of resources, it’s salt on our culture. And if anything, I’d like for people to look at the doubleness of Texas: its success and also its failures. I think Texas is growing, that’s the nature of Texas. And it is still a great culture, but unless we address the failures of the state, such as failures in education, healthcare, and the divisiveness in our politics, then we’re going to lose. We’re going to lose what makes Texas special.

Yeah, I agree. That’s very well put. Thank you. And as a Texan, I feel that very deeply as well. So what’s next for you? Do you have any upcoming tours or events you would to share with our readership or anything else like that?

Well, I am going to be doing a tour starting next week. I’ll be at Joe’s Pub in New York, and then I’ll also be going to Washington, D.C., and then a lot of Texas cities — Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, and even Georgetown. I’ll be doing some T.V. and stuff like that. And then I’ve got another novel that I’m working on that’s set in Hebron in Palestine. It’s a murder mystery, so it takes me quite far afield from Texas.

Thank you so much for meeting with me. It’s been a genuine pleasure. I’m very excited to brag to my South African friend that I had the opportunity to meet Lawrence Wright, which he’ll think is really cool. Do you have anything else that you feel needs to be said?

Oh, I guess the one thing that you might be interested in for the audiobook, we have music. I actually wrote a musical with my son and with Marsha Ball that we haven’t been able to produce yet, but we’ve written a lot of songs and so we just recorded eight of them. The instrumental portions of it will be in the text and at the end there’s like a cast album of the eight songs. So that was a lot of fun and I’m still burning with desire to make it a musical.

FICTION
Mr. Texas
By Lawrence Wright
September 19, 2023