Review by Booklist Review
Films like Friday Night Lights, Tin Cup, and No Country for Old Men let audiences see the hot, barren beauty of West Texas. Wright offers a similarly seductive portrait through words. If landscape is the star of his novel, the costar is Sonny Lamb, a small-time rancher who rescues his neighbor's daughter (and her horse) from a fire and becomes an overnight celebrity. This leads him into the orbit of political fixer L.D., who helps Lamb run for--and win--a seat in the Texas House of Representatives. From there, idealism wars with reality as Lamb learns just how deep into politics he can, and should, go. Wright is an award-winning political journalist, and this background helps him draw up a fascinating portrait of Lone Star legislating. "Over ten thousand bills will come up this session," L.D. tells one representative. "You care about maybe a dozen. My clients care for a few. Most of the rest nobody gives a country crap about." Is this cynicism or simply telling it like it is? Wright embeds the answer in this risible, rueful story. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Readers will flock to the first fictional outing from the author of Going Clear (2013) and The Plague Year (2021).
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Journalist and novelist Wright, whose nonfiction work The Looming Tower won the Pulitzer Prize, brings decades of insider knowledge to bear in this devilishly witty send-up of Texas politics. The novel opens at a funeral in West Texas; the death of a longtime Democratic state representative has drawn head honchos from Austin sniffing a chance to flip the seat. Among them is L.D. Sparks, a lobbyist scouting for a Republican replacement. A news clip of a local rancher bursting through flames to save a horse from a burning barn leads Sparks to military veteran Sonny Lamb, who with his wife, Lola, is struggling to hold onto his herd amid a devastating drought. Sparks sees "pure political gold" in the video and tells the dumbfounded Lambs he can get Sonny elected, casting the rancher's lack of experience as "a chance to write your own script." The plan works, and the bumbling and good-hearted Lamb suffers a few knocks while adjusting to his new life in Austin, where he eventually starts resisting his party's puppetmasters. Though the fable-like ending is a bit too transparently written for big-screen adaptation, Wright never loses sight of the dark consequences of all the political shenanigans. No one emerges unscathed in this rollicking satire. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Sept.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Any novel about politics in present-day Texas is almost certain to be about corruption, looniness, and knee-jerk reactionism. There's no room for an idealist in the State House, with its 151 members ranked strictly in order of seniority. But an idealist is what Sonny Lamb--veteran, rancher, Texan for six generations back--is. A fixer got Sonny elected, judging him a naïf without ideas, amenable to being led. But Sonny turns out to have a mind of his own. He wants to introduce a bill to reclaim the water beneath the bone-dry soil so that ranchers like him don't have to sell their spreads to pay their bills. But things don't work that way in Texas: somebody pays for anything that gets passed, and nobody rocks the boat. Still, by the end of this novel, Sonny emerges victorious, making him maybe the first great semi-decent politician Texas has seen in decades. VERDICT Wright's (The End of October) latest is at its best when characterizing the animals in this political swamp; other times it borders on the formulaic. But he carries it off well in this work that compares with the political novels of Ward Just and Thomas Mallon.--David Keymer
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
An unknown West Texas cattle rancher is elected to the State House of Representatives and becomes a star. The second novel from the Pulitzer Prize--winning journalist is totally different from his first, The End of October (2020), a thriller about bioterrorism that appeared right at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is also dramatically better. Tapping into his prodigious knowledge of and affection for the state of Texas, Wright gives us a novel about politics and people that at its best recalls classics like The Gay Place by Billy Lee Brammer and the work of Larry McMurtry. It begins when a powerful lobbyist named L.D. Sparks--"a silver-haired cynic in a gray western-cut suit and handmade boots"--shows up at the funeral of a longtime Democratic state rep, hoping to find a Republican who can take the seat. That turns out to be Sonny Lamb, who, with his wife, Lola, is barely keeping their herd going through the drought; they aren't having much luck expanding their own family, either. An Iraq vet with a checkered past, a currently incarcerated father, and no college degree, Sonny nonetheless has the heart of a hero, as we learn when he rushes into a burning barn to save a little girl's horse. The novel moves nimbly and amusingly through the campaign and Sonny's early days in Austin, with highlights including a feral-hog hunt and a fertility clinic debacle. When the newly elected Rep. Lamb chooses to follow his own lights rather than "dance with the one who brung [him]," he incites the ire of L.D. and his cabal, who immediately kick off plans for his ruin. Wright's prose is full of original and funny formulations--one character has "a smirk where his smile should be"; small towns between San Antonio and El Paso "[cling] to the interstate like ticks on a dog"; an obnoxious catfish farmer--turned-politico is "the brains behind the QAnon caucus," which is so dry it crackles. Just a few complaints: The sections about Sonny's plan to convert the wastewater produced by fracking into a solution for the drought sometimes seem to be turning into New Yorker articles, and the storyline about Sonny and Lola's marital troubles is not convincing. Wonderful characters, Texas-sized helpings of wit and insight, and, believe it or not, a vision of post-partisan redemption. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
