SOURCE: "Anything for Larry," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 30, 1988, pp. 1, 13.

In the review below, Gish, the author of Frontier's End, praises Anything for Billy as an intriguing example of a new type of Western.

There's much about the Old West and the Western novel that should stay dead and gone: the gun-slinging violence, the racism and sexism (all so predictable and stereotyped when "novelized"), the cussing and carousing—all the qualities that made the West so wild.

But the West (old and new), as every one knows, is a big place and its telling, remembering and imagining take many forms—in fiction and in fact. Moreover, it seems as if the Western novel may have recovered from its reported demise, dusted itself off and saddled up once again.

More than any other contemporary novelist, Larry McMurtry has been hard at work revitalizing the Western. Part of...