Loop Group

Loop Group by Larry McMurtry (2005)

Genre: Mid-to-late life crisis road trip saga in which the reader is invited to ask if the women running away from their lives are actually having a crisis or the crisis is the world’s expectation that they stand still.

Recommended For: Someone who loves Larry McMurtry’s writing and is brave enough to admit that he doesn’t need cowboys or Western sagas to do what he does best and that if you can’t find the same thrill in a story of two bored and aging women in Hollywood then you are the problem.

Buy here or check out at your local library. (Don’t go to the Jeff Bezos website).

A few weeks back I wrote about Dave Eggers’ Heroes of the Frontier. I mostly took that opportunity to write about Eggers himself and social media and really only briefly got into the book itself, which was generally pretty compelling. I also made a quick aside to question why Eggers chose to make the protagonist a woman. I’m sure he would scoff at the notion, as undoing the decision would drastically change essentially every element of the character. But I also think there were lazy assertions and choices sprinkled throughout the book that were the result of a man writing from the perspective of a woman.

Eggers is not the first person to make this mistake, in literature or otherwise. Plenty of men have spoken for women to the detriment of both women and the greater concept they are trying to serve. Misrepresentation doesn’t do anything but make us all lazier.

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Larry McMurtry is often given credit for his ability to write women characters well, despite being a man. It’s an odd gift, and a weird thing to give someone credit for. On one hand, it certainly suggests empathy and an ability to actually see and hear women. On the other hand, giving any man all that much credit for writing women characters sort of misses the point, which has always been, can you just let women represent themselves, especially given the very obvious fact that at every level of every industry they have to work harder to be paid less while being unequally represented.

All that being said, McMurtry writes great characters, full stop. I find they are never easily describable without using his words. They aren’t bursting with superlatives. You just get the gist of what they are going through very quickly. They become a familiar acquaintance.

Most people are thinking of Terms Of Endearment when they say that McMurtry writes great women characters, but Loop Group is such a fun and strange book. It feels like it is trying to accomplish absolutely nothing, and I don’t mean that to say it’s not an important book. His characters thrive because he is not trying to work them towards a greater message. When everything is said and done, we will have moved through so much fun dialogue, jumped from scene to scene, and yet, an inch of progress will be made. The world will be what it was, just like is the case when you close any book you’ve ever read, but in this case at least you got to know these people in some specific ways. You laughed at them wholeheartedly while being plenty aware of what caused them the most pain.

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Like any couple, there are songs that my wife and I play to death. We both find songs for sport. We’re addicted to it. We love new songs and we love old songs. The only thing we like better than finding a new song we love is finding an old song we love. Often, one of us finds one of the songs that becomes one of Our Canonical Songs and it gets played so much it can be hard to remember who found it. Actually, the person who found it, does in fact usually remember who found it because it’s a point of pride.

I found “Walk Between The Raindrops” by James McMurtry, the son of Larry.

It’s just an old geezer giving advice to some unnamed younger person. The beautiful part is that you can really imagine yourself being on the giving or receiving end of the advice. On some days, you might feel smart enough to give it. And on some days, you might need to hear it.

Stay alive inside, don’t be a stranger.
Keep a line open to the folks back home.
Don’t run and hide when everything changes.
Walk between the raindrops, dry as a bone

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Loop Group and Heroes of the Frontier are both about running away. Heroes of the Frontier tries to be about much more than that, which gives it many more opportunities to slip up, which it does, here and there. Loop Group has the discipline to be about one thing.

Running away is a feeling and a need. “Don’t run and hide when everything changes” is good advice generally, except that it can feel impossible. Running and hiding aren’t always the same thing. When everything changes, sometimes you just hide inside yourself. And that is what gets you. When the world expects something that you can’t deliver and you just hide in plain sight because it feels like inertia is all that’s left, then you’re barely existing.

Loop Group is about running as a reset and reiterating a pretty classic tale: If you’re going to run, find someone to come with you. All you really need in this world is someone to understand. And the two of you might need to get away.

3 More Things You Can Read Today:

-Pat Ellington Jr. Reclaims the Fullness of Black History Through the Lens of Baseball

-The Betrayal of a Friend’s False Testimony

-Shorts and You