Whatever subject he touches upon, even in promiscuous passing - memory, antiquarian bookselling, his own oeuvre - seems destined to fade gloomily away, like taillights vanishing into a blackened flat horizon.

'Because of when and where I grew up, on the Great Plains just as the herding tradition was beginning to lose its vitality,' McMurtry writes, 'I have been interested all my life in vanishing breeds.' Never has this fascination of his been so evident. The result is a lamentation not only for himself, as he wanders into his seventh decade, but for those like him: the storytellers, the griots, the troubadours of experience. In 'Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen,' his first dip into the green fields of memoir, McMurtry has applied those elegiac brush strokes to the canvas of his own life. Guess I ought to look into that.” But Susan Merritt, manager of the local Dairy Queen, where McMurty set his Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, tells the newspaper, “It’ll be a sad day if the store closes.Larry McMurtry has always been an elegist nearly every one of his 23 prior books - the bulk of them novels set amid the muted vistas and bald beige plains of McMurtry's West Texas homeland - is suffused with a bluesy sense of waning, of loss at half-speed. The books will stay right where they are - they can slumber in their majesty until the next turn of the wheel.” A Ft.Worth Star-Telegram report by Bud Kennedy says “the news has not exactly rocked his hometown of Archer City.” Told the news, Mayor Carl Harrelson responded “in a dry monotone straight out of. In an “important announcement” posted there, he says that the shut-down isn’t necessarily permanent, and he and business partner Marcia Carter “are by no means ready to say a final goodbye.” But, says McMurtry, “I, however, need a sabbatical.” The 68-year-old author says he wants to travel some before “I become too decrepit. Novelist Larry McMurtry has announced on website that he plans to close the giant used and rare bookstore, Booked Up, that he opened in his hometown of Archer City, Texas, (the scene of one of his most famous books, The Last Picture Show). Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, McMurtry elsewhere.

Walter benjamin at the dairy queen