When the Light Goes (2007)

Times are tough for the iconic males of late-20th-century American literature. Rabbit is dead; Zuckerman and Frank Bascombe have prostate cancer; and now, after too many chicken-fried steaks, Larry McMurtry's Duane Moore — introduced 41 years ago in The Last Picture Show — needs a triple bypass. When the Light Goes, an aimless bummer of a novel, finds the depressive Texan impotent, but crushing on both his lesbian psychiatrist and a 26-year-old geologist with perky nipples. The book is slapdash in execution, larded with halfhearted sex scenes, and populated by stick figures, suggesting that the light from this once luminous series may have gone for good. C