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Lawrence Wright.
‘An anecdotalist who wanders around and stops occasionally to point out the view, but somehow you end up getting where you’re going’ … Lawrence Wright. Photograph: Larry Busacca/Getty Images
‘An anecdotalist who wanders around and stops occasionally to point out the view, but somehow you end up getting where you’re going’ … Lawrence Wright. Photograph: Larry Busacca/Getty Images

God Save Texas by Lawrence Wright review – the future of America?

This article is more than 5 years old

This hymn to his complicated home state by the author of The Looming Tower is a pleasing blend of memoir, reportage and history

After my brother’s bar mitzvah, my parents threw a party at our house in Austin, Texas. At one point, we noticed the rabbi had gone missing. My dad eventually found him sitting in his car outside, listening to the Texas-Oklahoma football game on the radio. Lawrence Wright tells stories such as this in his new book. Wright is a New Yorker writer whose most famous work, The Looming Tower, is about the rise of al-Qaida (it has just been turned into a Hulu/Amazon series). There’s a political undertone to this one, too. Its subtitle is A Journey into the Future of America, and the argument is chiefly that Texas (and not California or New York) is the real bellwether of US life – the most sensitive reflection of what’s changing in it, and also the force most likely to shape it.

Wright serves up a campfire stew of memoir, reportage and historical digression. He is a typically Texas storyteller, an anecdotalist who wanders around and stops occasionally to point out the view, but somehow you end up getting where you’re going anyway. You can hear the New Yorker in his voice; his prose has a kind of polished informality. He starts off on a bicycle tour near San Antonio, with his friend and Virgil-figure, the novelist Steve Harrigan. He ends up camping with his wife in Big Bend national park, having a shit in the middle of the night and looking up: “In every generation until mine, most of humanity lived with the night sky. As people began moving into cities and using more illumination, the sky gradually disappeared. There must be a corresponding loss of wonder without the stars to remind us where we stand in creation.”

Along the way, he covers a lot of ground: the Texas revolution, the founding of the republic, the introduction of slaves, the civil war, the Kennedy assassination, the oil boom (and bust and boom again), fracking, political in-fighting in the state legislature (over the “bathroom ban”, restricting transgender people’s access to toilets, and sanctuary cities, where cooperation with immigration law is limited), the rapid and almost complete extinction of Texas Democrats (partly engineered by the Republican adviser Karl Rove), immigration and changing demographics, Trump’s Wall, Tea party politics, and the Austin music scene. Not to mention more personal subjects: his Dallas childhood, his marriage, his various professional ups and downs, the screenplay by Wright that Oliver Stone almost made, another play that was supposed to premiere in Houston until Hurricane Harvey hit, his life in Austin and the vague sense he has lived with of being stuck in the provinces, on the fringes of the real action – even though the book is an argument that the real action is here.

Wright is a liberal, but his sympathies range across the aisle. “Like many Texans, I harbour a fondness for the Bush family that has nothing to do with their politics.” He knows them personally and blames W’s “complacency and … absence of curiosity” for the failures of his presidency, rather than anything more sinister. Rove sometimes shows up at his breakfast club – and explains to Wright, among other things, how he turned Texas into a “red” state. But the demographics are swinging around again … though the people who show up at the polls haven’t changed as much as the place itself. Texas isn’t a “red” state, as the former Democratic Texas senator from Dallas, Wendy Davis, says, “it’s a nonvoting blue state”. She became famous for her 11-hour filibuster of a bill designed to limit access to abortions. (It passed anyway in the next session.)

Members of the transgender community and supporters protest at the Texas state capitol in Austin against the so-called ‘bathroom bill’ restricting toilet use. Photograph: Eric Gay/AP

Even on issues such as gun control, Wright tries to offer a balanced view: “When President Obama said, ‘States with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths,’ he was including suicides, which account for nearly two-thirds of gun deaths nationally.” At one point, Wright signs up for a firearms class, so he can bypass the security queues at the state capitol. I’ve experienced this phenomenon myself at the Texas book festival. The only people who can enter the grand old building (it’s a little taller than the Capitol in DC) unchecked are those with a piece of paper that says they are carrying a gun. Everyone else has to queue behind the metal detector to make sure they aren’t.

In Texas, it’s not always easy to separate what you like from what you don’t. There’s an admiring sketch of Joe Straus, the long-serving speaker of the Texas House of Representatives. He’s the kind of moderate Republican who stands for what used to be a Texas virtue – pragmatism, the willingness to get things done, even if it means working with political opponents. Wright follows Straus as he struggles to defeat the “bathroom bill”, which is just the kind of interventionist legislation that Texans and particularly Republicans are supposed to hate. Apart from anything else, it’s bad for business. But the rise of the Tea party has put one set of Texas virtues under threat, in defence of what they consider to be others.

The current governor’s “pet issue is fending off the malevolent influence of California”. The centre of that influence, and a city widely resented by the rest of Texas (or at least by their political representatives) is Austin, my hometown. Wright reflects: “When I tell people outside the state that I live in Texas, they often look at me uncomprehendingly. It’s like saying that you cheat on your taxes. But if I say I live in Austin, the nearly universal response is: ‘Oh, Austin is cool.’ For them, living in Austin is forgivable in a way that living in Texas is not.” His book is partly a reaction to this prejudice – in favour of the rest of the state, and sometimes at the expense of Austin, which has become one of the whitest and most “economically segregated cities in the country”. A Texan friend of Wright’s, on moving to California, said to him, “It’s confusing … I’ve never lived in a place where everybody agrees with me.” But Austin is becoming that kind of place. (It was an Austinite, Bill Bishop, who reported on this phenomenon in The Big Sort – about the fact that the US is increasingly arranging itself into homogeneous enclaves.)

Wright, though suspicious of this obsession with Californication, “sometimes bridles at the elite disdain that Californians express toward my state”. Yet the Texas model he has in mind isn’t Austin, it’s Houston – one of those Texas cities that gets a bad rap from outsiders; it will soon overtake Chicago as the country’s third-largest metropolitan area, behind New York and Los Angeles. “All the growth has been Latino, African American and Asian,” according to Stephen Klineberg of the Kinder Institute, a local charity. “Houston is now the single most ethnically diverse metro area in the country.” That’s partly because of the absence of zoning laws. Liberal politicians figured that zones were a way of keeping people out, so in Houston you can build pretty much anything anywhere. And it’s worked – Houston routinely tops lists of “best places to live” and has (according to the Washington Post) one of the five best restaurant scenes in the US, not to mention an “excellent opera and … more theatre space than any city except New York”. If only so much of it weren’t built on a flood plain.

Which is one reason the centre of the US energy industry is going to have to face the problem of climate change. “The hope for Houston and Texas is that it is in our basic DNA to do what is needed to succeed,” Klineberg tells Wright. And his friend Mimi Swartz, a longtime writer for the Texas Monthly, puts it this way: “This place could be either London or Lagos.”

On the whole, Wright is semi-optimistic. Part of the point of the book is to talk about the way the kinds of stories he tells shape people’s sense of where they live. The myths matter, too. “Sanford Levinson, a distinguished law professor at [the University of Texas], compares Texas to Scotland – another formerly independent nation that has never entirely accepted the loss of its independence.” As it happens, I grew up with Sandy, another Texan Jew – he’s a colleague of my parents. There’s a toast Jews make at Passover: “Next year in Jerusalem,” we say, at the end of the service. For me, and my brother and two sisters who live away, the Jerusalem we dream of coming back to is Austin.

Benjamin Markovits discusses his new novel, A Weekend in New York (Faber), at the British Library, London NW1, on Tuesday. God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Future of America is published by Allen Lane. To order a copy for £17 (RRP £20) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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