Pedro's Reviews > Moving On

From what I can gather after having read four of his novels, Larry McMurtry has to be one of the most versatile writers out there. This story couldn’t be more different from Lonesome Dove or the The Last Picture Show. If it wasn’t for the brilliant writing and OUTSTANDING characterisation I’m sure I would’ve believed this one had been written by someone else. Oh, and also the dialogue! I definitely have to mention the amazing dialogue. Average writers of the world read this novel and learn; this is how you should be doing it; this is how human beings talk, react and interact to and with each other.

Now, and to be completely honest I’ll have to say that I chose to pick this one up only because I had a feeling that it was going to be another winner in my long stretch of five star reads. And it was! It feels so good to know that there are authors I can rely on when I’m not feeling particularly risky and just want to enjoy a good and wonderfully written story packed with believable characters. For me Larry McMurtry is among those writers at the moment. An author I can really rely on because even the weakest story of his I’ve read so far was far far better than most of the crappy (and often pretentious) claptrap being published nowadays.

After loving every single page of a novel like this one it became even clearer to me why I didn’t, don’t and won’t ever enjoy a certain kind of books/stories.

Everything about this novel shines with such honesty that one starts to believe its characters are people we actually know in real life. People who were actually born, breathe, laugh, cry and will eventually die. It doesn’t matter if you like them or not because their humanity is too moving to be ignored.

In one sentence I’d say Larry McMurtry’s Moving on is a (sexy!) literary road trip across America.

I thought about leaving this review as it is but I really want to share a few more things with you, my friends. I can’t help it so here it goes:

Excerpt from page 778:

Hank drove all night toward the plains. The wind grew stronger as he rose from the coast. Sometimes it rocked the cars on the highway. He went through the little silent towns that spotted the darkness. When he got into rolling country he could often see their lights twenty miles away, then lose them, then see them again, and lights of the towns, at a distance in the darkness, distinct as stars, were always more beautiful than the empty towns themselves.

And finally here’s a list of book tittles mentioned for various reasons in the course of this masterpiece:

1. Catch 22
2. Incidents of Travel in Yucatan
3. Pnin
4. A Charmed Life
5. The Decipherment of Linear-B
6. Destry Rides Again
7. Sexus
8. Lolita
9. The Sot-Weed Factor
10. Pamela
11. On the Road
12. Middlemarch
13. Love among the Cannibals
14. The Golden Bough
15. Bonjour Tristesse
16. The Greek Myths
17. The Pocket Book of Modern Verse
18. The Ginger Man
19. The Waste Land
20. The Hobbit
21. Howl
22. The Rights of Infants
23. Essay of Dramatic Poesy
24. Tristram Shandy
25. After Strange Gods
26. Candy
27. The Magic Christian
28. The White Nile
29. Fables of Identity
30. The Hero with a Thousand Faces
31. Wuthering Heights
32. Kama Sutra
33. Paradise Lost As Myth
34. The Armed Vision
35. The Cloud of Unknowing
36. Chaucer
37. Matthew Arnold
38. Punch
39. The Carpetbaggers
40. The Philosophy of Literary Form
41. Angelique
42. The Marriage Art
43. Endgame
44. The Heart of Darkness
45. Anna Karenina
46. The Life and Opinions of Tristan Shandy, Gentleman
47. Herzog
48. An American Dream
49. The Rise of the Novel
50. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
51. Felix Holt, the Radical
52. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
53. The Egoist
54. The End of the Road
55. The Little Engine that Could
56. Valley of the Dolls
57. Letting Go
58. The Sun Also Rises
59. Crime and Punishment
60. The Idiot
61. Fathers and Sons
62. Lucile
63. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
64. The Maltese Falcon
65. The Big Sleep
66. Beowulf