Pass the Bottle

All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers a novel by Larry McMurtry.  Liveright.  277pp.  $15.95 ****

Everybody loves a story about a fuck-up.  When you read about a guy who is as likely to spend the night on a couch in the university library as he is in his bed at home (he has a key to the library); who considers Fig Newtons a nourishing breakfast, in fact a staple of his diet; who seems never to change clothes; who regularly gets drunk in the middle of the day, in fact keeps drinking until he’s blotto almost every time he has a drink; who seems not to have had a haircut for years (everybody keeps telling him to get one, including some Texas Rangers who apparently stop him on the road primarily for that reason); who marries a woman he barely knows and immediately impregnates her, but is soon enough fooling around with his next door neighbor, you think, My God, this guy is fucked up.  I might be fucked up, I mean, maybe I have a drink or two and my diet isn’t the best, but I’m not as fucked-up as this guy.  Thank God.

To top it all off, he’s a novelist.  Not just a wannabe, like many of the friends who surround him at Rice University and in Houston in general, but a man who has an agent, who has just sold a novel to Random House, and who has also got a movie deal, worth the princely sum (in 1972) of $40,000.  In the group of struggling grad students and would-be writers who surround him, he might as well be a millionaire.  The one thing he does every day, in a life that otherwise seems to be total chaos, is sit down and type five pages every morning (or maybe it’s ten.  I can’t remember)[1].  In that way alone he’s disciplined.  Otherwise he doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.

I believe Larry McMurtry to have written a great novel.  Lonesome Dove is the one Western I would recommend to people who have never read one and don’t think they care to.  It’s a brilliant piece of work that was made into a wonderful mini-series, and I not only read that book, but all of its various sequels, there must be four or five.  I enjoyed all of them, but none can match the marvelous story that he told in Lonesome Dove.[2]

You can’t help wondering if this novel is autobiographical.  There are all kinds of tantalizing details that resemble McMurtry’s life; he himself has said that those morning pages were the one constant in his life; he did attend Rice University, have a remarkable early success as a novelist, and sell many of his books—including, his first one—to the movies (Horseman, Pass By, made into the movie Hud).  Danny Deck seems tantalizingly similar to Larry McMurtry.  But I’m hoping the similarities end there.  A writer needs to live with more discipline than this, if only because it’s hard to write with a hangover.  There was one Charles Bukowski; I don’t expect another.

Danny seems irresistible to women (one reason I found the book mildly unbelievable.  What must this guy smell like, I kept asking myself).  No sooner has he married Sally, the woman he meets at a party on the first page, and with whom he has acrobatic and apparently satisfying sex, than his next door neighbor is coming over and starting off conversations with remarks like, “Hi.  I wanted to ask you something.  Does your wife like cunnilingus?”  He decides to move to San Francisco and, once he and his wife settle there, and she discovers she’s pregnant, she turns off the sex altogether, as if she just wanted a baby.  It seems that way at first, until Danny finds out she’s fooling around with their downstairs neighbor, as in, every afternoon.

He finds another woman to love, a graphic artist who is perhaps the most interesting person in the whole book, and who seriously tries to get him to clean up his act, keep his place neat and eat something other than Fig Newtons, but somehow sex doesn’t work out with her (I never understood why; she had some past trauma) so he wound up returning to Houston and flopping into bed not only with his former neighbor, the cunnilingus woman, but also with his best friend’s wife.

All his friends are going to be strangers because none of his current friends will ever want to see him again.

McMurtry is a wonderfully relaxed stylist who can spin out a story at a moment’s notice; I definitely enjoyed this book.  I took it up because Dwight Garner recommended it; he had written McMurtry’s obituary for the Times, and when he didn’t mention this among the man’s more enjoyable books, some readers corrected him, so he read it.  And I see all its virtues.  I came through the Sixties too, and there was a lot of sex going on, not just in Texas and San Francisco, and I like reading about the literary life, its triumphs and disappointments (at a book party for his novel, he wears a suit, though the zipper has somehow come off, and he still hasn’t gotten a haircut, and the avid bookseller has set up a table with a guy standing there with four bottles of champagne on ice.  One person shows up.  Sounds like one of my book parties, except for the champagne.  And the person).

But I have to say that, at age 73, I’m losing patience with the total fuck-ups (Bukowski’s an exception, because he somehow faced life head-on.  He was drunk at the time, but he faced it).  I feel as if I’ve read plenty about living the wrong way (it seems mildly ironic that his publisher his named Liveright), and not enough about the right way.  Just after I had started this novel, I saw the marvelous film Drive My Car, and that was so fundamentally serious, so focused on the big questions, that it was several days before I could pick up this novel again.  Larry McMurtry could spin out a story.  But did he ever ask himself what the whole thing was all about?  I wonder.

[1] I’ve read varying reports about McMurtry himself, whom I’ve been reading about as I read this book.  At one point in his life he wrote five pages every day, at another point ten.  It seems like a fairly major difference.  I don’t know why he decided to switch.

[2] When that book was published, in 1985, a book page editor of my acquaintance proposed a unique assignment: I would review this mega-Western that was just coming out, and that burst the seams of the genre, along with the latest Louis L’Amour novel.  L’Amour produced books at about the pace of one per year.  I can’t remember why that didn’t happen; he may have balked when he heard I’d never read a Western, and hadn’t read any McMurtry, or I may have balked when I heard that Lonesome Dove was 853 pages long.  Reviewers are always looking for short books, especially because you got paid the same amount either way.  I sometimes think that’s why shorter books get better reviews.