We see the town's collapse through Duane's eyes, through conversations he overhears or rumors that are brought to him. IN ''The Last Picture Show,'' the quest was not only for sex, but sex linked to tenderness and mystery, to love. In ''Texasville,'' sex is just sex. It happens everywhere and often. Texasville'' is a novel about going broke, not about getting along without money.
Nobody suffers material deprivation.
People don't go hungry or wear out their clothes. As their bank balances decline, people seem to eat more steak, to keep on buying houses and cars and video tapes and throwing away guns. It is a book about what sudden affluence does to a community, and about the anxiety of losing it. For all the novel's unrestrained humor, Mr. McMurtry suggests that human nature is at least partly a function of human circumstances and, at its worst, a function of money. He doesn't ask us to feel sorry for his characters, but to laugh at their crude one-liners and to be appalled at, and yet admiring of, their raw material decadence.