Anything for Billy

published	October 15th 1988 by Simon and Schuster
binding	Hardcover
isbn	0671642685 (isbn13: 9780671642686)
ebook
pages	311
description	The first time I saw Billy he came walking out of a cloud....Welcome to the wild, hot-blooded adventures of Billy the Kid, the American West's most le...more [close] The first time I saw Billy he came walking out of a cloud....Welcome to the wild, hot-blooded adventures of Billy the Kid, the American West's most legendary outlaw. Larry McMurtry takes us on a hell-for-leather journey with Billy and his friends as they ride, drink, love, fight, shoot, and escape their way into the shining memories of Western myth. Surrounded by a splendid cast of characters that only Larry McMurtry could create, Billy charges headlong toward his fate, to become in death the unforgettable desperado he aspires to be in life. Not since Lonesome Dove has there been such a rich, exciting novel about the cowboys, Indians, and gunmen who live at the blazing heart of the American dream. [close]
date added	08-06-07 edit book

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Patrick rated it:

05/04/08

bookshelves: larry-mcmurtry

Read in May, 2008

This is McMurtry's fictional take on the Western outlaw Billy the Kid. Seen through the first person narration of a wealthy and civilized pulp novelist who just happened to fall in with Billy The Kid just around the start of the adventures (and killings) that made him famous, Billy is portrayed sympathetically as a troubled but engaging young man who has a tendency to cold-bloodedly murder anyone whom he takes offense to. He is also easily manipulated by those who would seek to take advantage ...more This is McMurtry's fictional take on the Western outlaw Billy the Kid. Seen through the first person narration of a wealthy and civilized pulp novelist who just happened to fall in with Billy The Kid just around the start of the adventures (and killings) that made him famous, Billy is portrayed sympathetically as a troubled but engaging young man who has a tendency to cold-bloodedly murder anyone whom he takes offense to. He is also easily manipulated by those who would seek to take advantage of his murderous nature, and McMurtry creates a scheming seductress who uses Billy to wipe out her rivals for the inheritance of one of the largest ranches in the West.

This is a very odd tale, not even close to one of McMurtry's best. Many of the characters and plot elements appear to be borrowed from other, better McMurtry book, written before and since. Published in 1988, just after McMurtry's most creative period (in my opinion) when he wrote the superb books Lonesome Dove and Texasville, this book appears at the outset to be a poor man's Lonesome Dove. The plot is very convoluted but not too hard to follow. The numerous characters are the strongest part of the book. They are nearly all interesting but not very well fleshed out. These folks all compete for space with one another, and die with almost numbing regularity and suddenness, usually at the hands of another character. In the end, the only constants are Billy the Kid and the narrator.

This may have all been intentional on McMurtry's part...his take on the West at that time (his "West" of this era being mainly Texas, the Oklahoma Territory, New Mexico, and parts of Kansas and Arizona) is that it was a violent, uncultured, outlandish place filled with fascinating people who acted out of the basest of human motivations and who usually died violently before they had much a chance to accomplish anything. McMurtry recognizes that most Americans of the time from the East and many Europeans were intrigued by the West for these very reasons, and yet he seeks throughout his "old West" fiction to portray the era in a realistic fashion, reminding us just how brutal life was in that time and place, perhaps so we are less likely to glorify it.

And yet, because he writes with such humor and is so wonderful at creating memorable characters that we care about, we read on through the brutal depictions of life in the West to get to the end, often hoping that McMurtry doesn't kill off our favorite characters prematurely, knowing (often as a result of McMurtry's blunt foreshadowing, as is the case with this book) that he probably will, since that serves his thematic purpose.

In nearly every other novel I've read by McMurtry, this combination works, but it doesn't in this one. The book seems a little rushed, despite its 380+ pages. This might be becasue the chapters are so short. Most are only two to three pages; the longest is no more than six pages long. This is a fast read, but not necessarily a compelling one...I would expect that folks who haven't read any of his better books would wonder what all the fuss is about, and put it down long before the plot starts to pick up speed when the main characters arrive in Greasy Corners and become involved in what McMurtry calls the Whiskey Glass War.

It may be that I didn't enjoy this book as much because I had different expectations for what a McMurtry novel should be like. The humor is never quite there in Anything For Billy, though there is some occasional funny dialogue and many ludicrous circumstances. From the first we sense that Billy is a doomed character, and he quickly demonstrates that he knows it too. That makes the book kind of sad. Who actually kills him in the end adds to the sense of tragedy, and is a bit of a surprise, since by the end of the book Billy's managed to rile up quite a few of the main players in his area of the West, and they are out for his blood. If anything, the last part of the book and the death scene reminded of the end of the classic Blues Brothers movie, in which Belushi and Ackroyd have managed to bring down the wrath and attention of groups as disparate as the local Hell's Angels, the American Nazi Party and the Illinois State Police, plus a bunch of others I can't recall. But though the actions of the Blues Brother were humorous, Billy's actions in the main were murderous, often murders of people he had encountered for the first time only a few seconds before, most notably a ten year old Apache boy who just happened to be coming down the same trail Billy was going up. McMurtry does not play these scenes for laughs; he often has a character remark as to how Billy's murders have taken away a son, or brother, or husband, or father, from other people. But as the narrator so often points out, Billy never realizes this; the narrator is puzzled throughout the book by Billy's lack of remorse or semblance of any feelings for those he hs killed, and occasionally offers a brief observation as to what may have missing in Billy The Kid's psyche that enabled to kill so ruthlessly without any afterthought at all.

A word on the historical accuracy of the book...as best as I can tell from some brief research, many of the events and people in Anything For Billy have some basis in reality, though McMurtry has taken great liberties with their actual accomplishments and the real-life relationships to each other. But the death of Billy The Kid is very different from the way Billy actually died, so I'm not sure that fans of the "real" or legendary Billy The Kid would enjoy this book very much. This novel is most likely to be enjoyed by McMurtry fans who have very little knowledge of the Billy The Kid legends....less

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