Moving On : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: A Grand Achievement
Review: I am in the process of rereading Moving On and just checked Amazon for other readers' comments, which I found intriguing. I originally bought this book for two reasons: 1.)I'm a Larry McMurtry fan and 2.) I was interested in the rodeo aspects of the book. I was initially disappointed when Jim and Patsy left the rodeo circuit for the "desperation of suburban Houston," but I finished the book anyway. When I picked it up again recently, I intended only to reread the rodeo-related passages, and now (deep into the Houston section)I find I can't stop reading. McMurtry's creation of Patsy Carpenter is a grand achievement. Her endless crying aside, she is one of the most completely realized characters in contemporary literature. I can't think of any other novel that chronicles with such convincing precision the moment by moment emotional life of a single character. There are times, certainly, when I find her annoying, but she is also endlessly compelling. The other characters (Pete, Eleanor, Sonny)are a great added treat in the novel, but it is ultimately Patsy who impresses, and it is for the creation of her that we should consider Moving On one of McMurtry's best works. (P.S. to the earlier reviewer who gave the book a "lone star," what you say about the Waggoner ranch is very true. The descriptions are so beautiful that you want to move there (but then it functions as a kind of oasis in the book), and Roger is a touching character whose simple language belies great depth. McMurtry has created him with great affection.)

Rating:
Summary: In the mood. . .
Review: This is an early McMurtry novel, a long, rambling story with young Patsy Carpenter at the center of a large cast of characters that includes graduate students, ranchers, rodeo cowboys, a Hollywood writer, Haight-Ashbury hippies, and wealthy Texans - both new and old money. Written in the late 1960s, and published in 1970, "Moving On" is interesting for its attempt to capture the subtly shifting moods of its central characters instead of focusing on action and storyline. As page follows page, McMurtry describes his characters' feelings of self-assurance, annoyance, boredom, frustration, and sexual tension. And often moods degenerate into tears - Patsy's in particular.

There's more than a bit of Henry Miller in much of the novel, as characters attempt to match up their levels of sexual passion, often finding that they are rarely feeling the same thing for each other at the same time. Seduction is often unsuccessful or unsatisfying, a rendezvous full of romantic promise may turn into an argument leaving both parties exhausted. A pass made after several drinks at a party or over a milk shake at a soda fountain may elicit an exchange of bitterness and barbed recriminations. A married couple talks openly of their infidelities. A wife accuses her husband of being neglectful, while she routinely meets a colleague of his for sex.

For readers who like action and narrative development, this book will seem very slow going. For some, the many shifts of mood and ironies of thwarted intentions will make the story seem flat and the central characters unfocused. By contrast, the marginal characters, especially an old widowed rancher, a rodeo clown and his young barrel-racer girlfriend, and a teenage bronc rider spring from the page fully realized. A few scenes are pumped up with melodrama (a professor's wife breaks down in front of the girl her husband has tried to seduce; a champion rodeo cowboy refuses to accept that a ranch-owning woman he's been bedding is growing tired of him; a pregnant young woman is rescued from a drugged existence with a sinister boyfriend). But the most crisply vivid and emotionally honest scenes involve the death and burial of an old man in the nearly treeless prairie northwest of Dallas. They're simple and understated like the country folks who people these pages.

McMurtry says that this novel emerged from an image of a young woman in a car eating a melted chocolate bar. What follows that image is one thing after another, until we reach the end almost 800 pages later, and that same woman, now divorcing her husband, feels a kind of independence that may never surrender itself to another man. Some readers will find this ending worth the trip; others may find themselves, like McMurtry's characters, in a somewhat different mood.

Rating:
Summary: The first of McMurtry's Houston books ...
Review: To correct and amplify on some of the earlier reviews -- As Wagner's 'Ring' is a prologue followed by a trilogy, Larry McMurtry's Houston books are a trilogy followed by a epilogue -- in chronological order, 'Moving On', 'All My Friends Are Going to be Strangers', 'Terms of Endearment', and 'The Evening Star'. After McMurtry attended Texas Tech University, he went to graduate school in English at Rice University in Houston, where he lived and taught in the late '60s - early '70s. These novels are a perfect historical & sociological mirror of the time & place (I was there, too), but more than that they are stories of memorable, completely developed, fully complex characters lost between an old & mythical Texas of ranches & rodeos and the new urban Texas fueled by big money, real estate & oil. Is there a more memorable character than Patsy Carpenter in contemporary American literature? She cries a lot -- oh, does she cry -- but she cries because she is lost, alone & confused, and McMurtry never backs away from or softens his portrayal of her despair. We intimately know her family & friends, their loves, affairs, betrayals and kindnesses, and they quickly become believable, fully human, and known. This is a long book and, in musical terms, stays mostly between mezzo-piano & mezzo-forte -- short on dramatic plot development and cathartic climaxes. But 'Moving On' is a beautifully developed portrait of a group of almost-real people, and you will remember them for a long, long time.