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Got a powerful hankering to reread Moving On last night. I've already reread all 728 pages at least three times but not for the past 20 years or so.
Alas! The epub was only available through Amazon, which, of course, I hate and have vowed a mighty oath never, ever to use.
But what are you going to do when you have an itch that only Amazon can scratch?
Reader, I bought it.
The $8.88 I spent will pay for approximately one-half of a bolt on Bezos's yacht.
Maybe it's the bolt that will break and sink the whole fucking thing.
A girl can dream.
###
Moving On is a deeply flawed novel, which I kinda knew even the first time I read it in the McGill University library stacks so very, very long ago while the golden light poured through dusty windows. (What I didn't know was how profligate I was being in wasting my youth.)
But if you're ever trying to figure out why people who live in Texas—or who once lived in Texas—love Texas, it is the novel to read. Moving On drips Texas.
It doesn't have much of a plot.
It's a more or less aimless chronicle of three years in the life of a highly annoying character named Patsy Carpenter who is Jacy Farrow with an education: Pretty—though McMurtry has a hard time describing her prettiness, which is weird because McMurtry is very good at describing un-pretty characters. Entitled. Rich. Reads a lot—this is how McMurtry tries to make the character endearing; it doesn't work.
Patsy Carpenter has the worst dialogue of any character in any McMurtry novel.
I kept trying to hear the dialogue as I skimmed the quotation marks on the page, but honestly, that's not possible. Nobody talks like that no matter how pretty, entitled, rich, well-read, and pert they are.
Patsy's dialogue, too, is kind of a mystery because McMurtry is known for his realistic dialogue, and indeed, the other Moving On characters—with the exception of the Los Angeles contingent, Joe Percy, who is thrown in to provide deus ex machina—speak very realistically.
What Moving On has going for it, though, is that somehow its characters and the things that happen to them lodge in the same part of your brain as actual people you know and the things that happen to them. It's a very strange and unique literary alchemy that has something to do with the bemused, third-person narrative voice. (If I were writing a Ph.D. thesis on the works of Larry McMurtry, I'd go to greater lengths in my analysis.) Reading Moving On, I kept wondering: What if I were a Larry McMurtry character? What kind of novel would Larry McMurtry write about me?
###
Anyway, I got about a third of the way through the book and so stayed up much later than I ordinarily do. When I finally slept, I dreamed about Marybeth: We had a horrible fight because I had taken her diary—a leather-bound volume with pages and pages of neat, blue-ballpoint script—and done something so bad to it that we stopped speaking. (In real life, Marybeth and I also stopped speaking, but we never had a horrible fight because I never could articulate exactly what she'd done to me—though I felt it, I felt it.)
Today I must Remunerate as soon as I get back from the transfer station, which I must go to because Icky is too cheap to pay for garbage service.
Also, fresh-faced little Brian finally passed along the right password to the Adrienne-4-Ulster-County SquareSpace account, so I'm gonna try and finish that website by the end of the weekend.
Alas! The epub was only available through Amazon, which, of course, I hate and have vowed a mighty oath never, ever to use.
But what are you going to do when you have an itch that only Amazon can scratch?
Reader, I bought it.
The $8.88 I spent will pay for approximately one-half of a bolt on Bezos's yacht.
Maybe it's the bolt that will break and sink the whole fucking thing.
A girl can dream.
###
Moving On is a deeply flawed novel, which I kinda knew even the first time I read it in the McGill University library stacks so very, very long ago while the golden light poured through dusty windows. (What I didn't know was how profligate I was being in wasting my youth.)
But if you're ever trying to figure out why people who live in Texas—or who once lived in Texas—love Texas, it is the novel to read. Moving On drips Texas.
It doesn't have much of a plot.
It's a more or less aimless chronicle of three years in the life of a highly annoying character named Patsy Carpenter who is Jacy Farrow with an education: Pretty—though McMurtry has a hard time describing her prettiness, which is weird because McMurtry is very good at describing un-pretty characters. Entitled. Rich. Reads a lot—this is how McMurtry tries to make the character endearing; it doesn't work.
Patsy Carpenter has the worst dialogue of any character in any McMurtry novel.
I kept trying to hear the dialogue as I skimmed the quotation marks on the page, but honestly, that's not possible. Nobody talks like that no matter how pretty, entitled, rich, well-read, and pert they are.
Patsy's dialogue, too, is kind of a mystery because McMurtry is known for his realistic dialogue, and indeed, the other Moving On characters—with the exception of the Los Angeles contingent, Joe Percy, who is thrown in to provide deus ex machina—speak very realistically.
What Moving On has going for it, though, is that somehow its characters and the things that happen to them lodge in the same part of your brain as actual people you know and the things that happen to them. It's a very strange and unique literary alchemy that has something to do with the bemused, third-person narrative voice. (If I were writing a Ph.D. thesis on the works of Larry McMurtry, I'd go to greater lengths in my analysis.) Reading Moving On, I kept wondering: What if I were a Larry McMurtry character? What kind of novel would Larry McMurtry write about me?
###
Anyway, I got about a third of the way through the book and so stayed up much later than I ordinarily do. When I finally slept, I dreamed about Marybeth: We had a horrible fight because I had taken her diary—a leather-bound volume with pages and pages of neat, blue-ballpoint script—and done something so bad to it that we stopped speaking. (In real life, Marybeth and I also stopped speaking, but we never had a horrible fight because I never could articulate exactly what she'd done to me—though I felt it, I felt it.)
Today I must Remunerate as soon as I get back from the transfer station, which I must go to because Icky is too cheap to pay for garbage service.
Also, fresh-faced little Brian finally passed along the right password to the Adrienne-4-Ulster-County SquareSpace account, so I'm gonna try and finish that website by the end of the weekend.
