BOOKS in the mirror

McMurtry Does It Again…Beautifully

Scott Eyman
Cox News Service

LOOP GROUP
by Larry McMurtry
Simon & Schuster
304 pages

   WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - For 40 years, Larry McMurtry has gone his own way, publishing nearly a book a year -- 36 so far, including his new novel, Loop Group.
   He's a writing man more in the mold of the English, who tend to be peripatetic, than the American, who tend to specialize.
   Although his greatest successes have come with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove and a batch of sequels, he's also a master of the modern American West. He has written novels about hardscrabble small towns, as well as character-centered novels, essays about literature, essays about film and the occasional movie script.
   I'd venture to say that McMurtry may be one of the best writers we've had on the subjects of solitude and space. His most memorable characters always seem to be alone, whether they're on the range or in their house.
   Loop Group returns McMurtry to the world of Terms of Endearment, The Desert Rose and Evening Star -- novels about women. As has been noted, he writes women very well (Terms - Aurora Greenway, The Desert Rose - Harmony), but then he writes men very well, too.
   Maggie Clary, his new heroine, is closing in on Social Security, but she's still working. Maggie runs a loop group, a loosely knit configuration of people who dub crowd noise and other random bits of dialogue for movies and TV shows.
   Maggie is part of that invisible core of paycheck-to-paycheck workers on the fringes of the entertainment industry. She's Hollywood born and Hollywood bred, still lives in her parents' house in the heart of the run-down Las Palmas district and has no interest in leaving, ever. She hangs around Hollywood Boulevard and usually eats at Musso and Frank's, where Paolo, a waiter who's been there nearly as long as the building, has unsuccessfully coveted her for 30 years.
   She has her children and grandchildren, she has her job, she has her extended family of loopers, and she has Connie.
   Connie is Maggie's best pal, the sister she never had. They can talk frankly about men and sex -- Connie is less discriminating than Maggie -- or anything but Maggie's three daughters, of whom Connie is jealous.
   Before the novel opens, Maggie has a hysterectomy; that's why she's been dragging around without her customary brio. ("It's just that I miss my womb," Maggie says. "I lost an important part of myself. How else can I put it?")
   She's also fallen out of love with her house and is sleeping in a tent in the back yard. As she tells her worried daughters, "The house was where I lived when I was the other Maggie. The house belonged to her and she belonged to the house. But I'm not that Maggie any more."
   Most of Loop Group involves the preparations for and the events of a classic road trip as she and Connie drive out to Texas to stay with Maggie's Aunt Cooney, a tough old bird who's pushing 90 and runs a large-scale chicken ranch with barns labeled "Chicken Gulag 1," "Chicken Gulag 12," etc.
   Aunt Cooney is somewhere between Beulah Bondi and Marjorie Main-not only does she pack a powerful emotional punch, she packs heat. Aunt Cooney's house is the largest between Amarillo and Kansas City, her dining room features a stained glass window of Elvis and over her fireplace she has three giant stuffed roosters.
   "I don't stuff any old roosters, I just stuff the ones who have enough personality to keep me entertained," she explains. "Those naughty boys kept me entertained pretty good."
   You might say that chickens are her life.
   Loop Group sets the bar lower than a novel like The Desert Rose -- the main characters are true, but a lot of the peripheral people are awfully broad, closer to musical comedy than drama.
   But it's hard to be churlish with McMurtry. If anybody has earned the right to a lighthearted picaresque about clinical depression, it's him. Besides, he's clearly having a good time, and his characters are all very likable.
   Even Maggie's therapist, an aging Sicilian whom she's had the hots over for years, is a sweetheart, although his younger bodybuilder wife -- whom we never meet -- keeps beating him up.
   But somehow, we know things will work out, even though McMurtry is legendary for the way he arbitrarily kills off characters that his readers grow fond of, and Loop Group is no exception.
   The novel is actually a loose, feminist version of McMurtry's Duane's Depressed, a sequel to The Last Picture Show and Texasville that nobody liked but me. As with the earlier book, Loop Group is essentially about how its central character gets her groove back.
   It also has a couple of fall-down funny ribald scenes, with laconic bitterness and human screwiness as the byword. "Howdy ladies," says a Texas state trooper in one of the episodes that can be quoted. "Is this place hell on earth, or what?"
   If Mark Twain had ever gotten close to the subject of sex, which is about the only incendiary topic he shied away from, he might have come up with something as delightful as Loop Group.
  
   Notable Novels of 2004
  
   It's not even close. Philip Roth's The Plot Against America is the best book I read this year, which, looking back, was quite strong, with fiction decisively trumping nonfiction that seemed to occupy itself largely with servicing various political agendas.
   I responded to Roth's audacity, his passionate telling of an alternate history for both the Roth family and America, in which the anti-Semitic Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt for the presidency in 1940 and slowly begins a process of resettlement for American Jews.
   It expresses two primary themes; the distrust that Roth's parents' generation had for the goyim, never more so than when it co-opts Jews such as the Sulzbergers, whose New York Times cautiously supports the Lindbergh administration's plans; and Roth's slow-burning devotion to his father, already fully expressed in the nonfiction Patrimony.
   It's not Roth's best novel (the ending is nowhere near as convincing as the rest of the book, and if you want that, then go with American Pastoral or Portnoy's Complaint) but it shows the wily old man is still throwing fastballs.
   Faithful, by Davitt Sigerson, about the two strongest, usually mutually exclusive drives: family and sex.
   The Amateur Marriage, by Anne Tyler - our best novelist of domesticity delineates that most agonizing of states, a long-term marital mismatch, with wit, asperity and a gentle but unyielding eye.
   Oracle Night by Paul Auster - a clever novel within a novel whose secondary story is actually more interesting than the frame story. Still, at times, it achieves a transparent narrative pull like something out of Scheherazade, by one of the best of modern storytellers.
   The Lady and the Unicorn, by Tracy Chevalier - another delicate inquiry into the nature of artistic inspiration by the author of Girl With a Pearl Earring, this time a medieval French tapestry.
   Among nonfiction, attention must be paid to Bob Dylan's Chronicles, consistently interesting and even surprising, though I didn't believe a word of it. Dylan is as much a master of image as Madonna, but he writes better songs.