Like his father, novelist Larry McMurtry, James McMurtry has a conflicted relationship with the West Texas of his youth, illustrated nowhere better than in this vivid, poison-pen Valentine to all the little towns lost in the flat immensity of the Panhandle. Though he can deride Levelland, Texas as owing its founding to a wheel coming off a wagon, and dismiss it as an insignificant speck from the perspective of jet travelers far overhead, McMurtry can still summon the abiding majesty of the countryside by evoking a young mother dreaming on the porch at night, watching the stars in the vast South Plains sky.  The woman, like so many of McMurtry's characters, will end up inevitably compromised: "I don't think she's seen the sky/Since we got the satellite dish…" A laconic reminder that life anywhere-no matter how glamorous or how plebian-is still just life.