Ironic, but I picked up John A. Brock’s The Great Ice Cream War of Summer 2016 almost 60 years to the day that The New York Times reviewed Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show. I dabbled at The Great Ice Cream War here and there for a few weeks, and then finished it just before the new year. It brought to mind some of the things I remember reading in the Times review:
Nothing much happens in Larry McMurtry’s third novel, The Last Picture Show. But then nothing much happens in Thalia, the small Western town he is writing about. A sorrier place would be hard to find. It is desiccated and shabby physically, mean and small-minded spiritually. Mr. McMurtry is expert in anatomizing its suffocating and dead-end character. Although the town faces the open prairie, it has no horizons and is as joyless as a 24-hour movie house at 10 in the morning. It is a place in which a man can live all his life and end up feeling anonymous.
The town where Brock’s Great Ice Cream War takes place could be described in similar terms, but I think the Times review of The Last Picture Show lacks experiential context and comes off snarky, as if beneath the Times and the critic. To be fair, McMurtry himself called Last Picture Show a “spiteful” story designed to “lance some of the poisons of small-town life” that he endured as a youth.
The Great Ice Cream War corrects both views. If you grew up in a small town, you know some of these characters a little if not very, very well. And your life with or around them wasn’t “joyless” any more than your town was “desiccated.” It was simply smaller and farther out. Arguably just a micro-vision of the macro.
Ted and Sophie Stroud run an old ice cream shop he took over from his father. A new gelato food truck comes to town, making the Stroud place seem passé. The Stroud family’s struggle to compete with their new, more tech-savvy competitors is a story as old as West Texas. New towns replacing older ones. Hometown skating rinks done in by arcades and malls. Drive-in theaters made obsolete by indoor cineplexes, indoor cineplexes being compromised by cable TV, and cable TV slowly kneecapped by streaming services. It’s become the way of the world, and it’s happening so fast we often don’t notice.
In TheGreat Ice Cream War, Brock, whose short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies, takes measure a dozen different ways. I enjoyed some of the nostalgia: “Like the most memorable summer days, the rest of the afternoon passed by in a carefree blur.” I was struck by some of the sharp prose: “The deeper they drove into the new developments, the more the roads weaved and turned.” And I admired some of the profound though scant political commentary: “But this election seemed different, as if the fragile bridge between the two opposing political parties had fallen into the water below.”
It may be accurate to say that “nothing much happens” in Brock’s first work of longform fiction, but in a small town, “nothing much” is a lot. And it’s still poignant and meaningful to the inhabitants (and the reader) subject to the ebbs and flows within a small community.
Willie Nelson is from tiny Abbott, Texas. Matthew McConaughey was born in Uvalde. Roy Orbison was reared in Wink. Robert E. Howard was from Peaster. McMurtry was a native of Archer City. Big things often spring from small places, and Brock, a Lubbock resident and the sales and marketing manager for Texas Tech University Press, has crafted a modest novella that explores some mighty big issues.
The Great Ice Cream War of Summer 2016 is a thoughtful, allegorical narrative with two scoops of heart and a happy ending that too many small Texas towns and their residents rarely find themselves on the receiving end of.
Fort Worth native E.R. Bills is the author of Texas Obscurities: Stories of the Peculiar, Exceptional & Nefarious and several other works of acclaimed nonfiction.
The Great Ice Cream War of Summer 2016, by John A. Brock
