A book that sees politicians as people
Their many flaws are on display in Lawrence Wright's Mr. Texas.
The writers exploring our divided country include Lawrence Wright, whose home state is the setting for his novel Mr. Texas.
Wright is a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, though that title hardly begins to capture his versatility. His non-fiction book subjects range from the history of Al-Qaeda to an investigation of Scientology. He wrote a play that dramatized the negotiations leading to the Camp David Accords. A few years ago he came up with a novel about a pandemic; he finished in 2019, and it was published in early 2020 as a real pandemic was spreading. Having imagined such a disaster in advance, he went on afterward to write a nonfiction book about the national response to the crisis.
In Austin recently I had lunch with Wright and my former NPR colleague John Burnett, who is Wright’s longtime bandmate (yes, Wright is also in an Austin-based band). They took me for chicken soup at a downscale Mexican restaurant. Wright mentioned in passing that he’d just turned in another novel that seemed to mirror current events. I won’t say what it is, but when he described it, Burnett and I howled in unison.
Wright’s current novel begins in West Texas ranch country, which the author clearly knows well. (He has also written a nonfiction book about Texas.) Somewhere not far from Marfa we meet Sonny Lamb, a man who is, in no particular order, an Iraq War veteran, a rancher, and a loser. His in-laws make no secret that they think his wife married below herself.
Lamb is trapped by forces larger than himself. Climate change is drying out the land, now swept by constant wildfires. The dried-out grass supports less and less livestock. Sonny, running short of money, has been forced to thin out his herd and think about the death of the whole region. I’d like to tell you that this novel portrays an apocalyptic future, but it is the present; the governor in the novel is the current real-life governor, Greg Abbott.
Sonny is nearly broke when a wildfire breaks out, and he rescues a child from a burning barn. The chance event makes him a local hero, and a political operator exploits his sudden fame—taking Sonny in hand to run him for the Texas legislature. Sonny is a rural white man who by temperament considers himself Republican, the party label he now embraces; but in reality, he admits, he has never thought seriously about political issues at all. To his Republican mentor, this is a benefit. Sonny is just the kind of man who will need to lean on the lobbyist’s advice.
But then Sonny takes up a political cause that grows out of his daily life—and it alarms his new colleagues in the conservative legislature, because his idea sounds progressive. Also expensive. He wants to save himself, his neighbors and their dried-out land through government action, drilling down to an aquifer of brackish water beneath West Texas and desalinating it so it can be used. (While the story is fiction, the brackish water is fact.)
In the legislature he encounters representatives of a changing Texas. The man who sponsored his candidacy is a once-idealistic lawmaker, now a supreme insider lobbyist for oil interests. There’s a newly elected Latina representative with big ambitions, and a Black gay conservative who represents a predominantly gay neighborhood in Houston. Presiding over such characters is Big Bob Bigbee, the House speaker. Wright describes him as a ruthless politico with a tortured soul, whose deep love for Texas makes him desperate to prevent the truly crazy lawmakers from taking charge.
It would be easy to assume that Wright is going to deliver a wicked takedown of a state legislature that is driving the state to ruin. But it becomes apparent that the author has some affection for the place and the people in it. (Though he may also think they are driving the state to ruin.)
By affection I simply mean that Wright is willing to write about politicians as if they are human beings, responding to ordinary human impulses and frailties. This is an innovative way to talk about political figures in 2023! Everyone is flawed, and many are far too comfortable with corruption, though nobody is really demonized.
The central character of Mr. Texas—with his vaguely Republican cultural beliefs, and his pragmatic need for state action—personifies some of our national divisions. Polarized though we are, we sometimes confront common threats. And maybe we’re not quite as far apart as we seem.
Thanks for reading Differ We Must, a companion to my book of the same name, which explores our modern divisions. Differ We Must illuminates an earlier time, telling Lincoln’s life story through meetings with people who disagreed with him. You can find it at your bookstore or order it here.