All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers (2002) - Plot & Excerpts
I feel like I need to read McMurtry's other works before I can properly review this since it seems to be reflecting and commenting on some of his well-traveled themes, so this will be somewhat of a cursory analysis. Half way through the book, I started to feel like I was just in the backseat of McMurtry’s protagonist’s El Chevy, being thrown this way and that around the Southwest; rambling along into different worlds with not a lot of direction from Danny or the book. I think I even started mentally asking Danny “Where are we going now?” And when Danny started to look for his pregnant wife (and general whore) Sally, I started to ask myself if McMurtry knows where we are going next. But just like the way Johnny Carson used to guide even his most rowdy interviews in a precise, controlled way, so does McMurtry lead us to where he wants us. With a cast of characters lining up all around Danny, he’s trying to find at least one person he can connect with. He first looks with just his eyes for someone, which leads him to the soulless, heartless, morally devoid Sally. My hatred of all characters like Sally, women supposedly looking like angels with demon blood running through them, dragged me and the book down. Fortunately, Danny smartens up in San Francisco and leaves her. I, at least, felt the weight lift off of me, but Danny seems hopelessly rudderless. He finds himself plucked into literary parties and drug-fueled communes, always acutely aware of how out of place he is. And when he goes to L.A., he finally finds one woman, Jill, he feels mentally at home with…but unlike his carnal relationship with Sally, he can’t physically become one with her. Again, he’s rejected from having a world. Then there’s the bizarre and utterly surreal visit to his uncle's, where, obscenely, a ranch hand keeps screwing everything that has a hole (mostly inanimate objects). The slaughter of the goats was wretchedly gruesome. Too much gore for both Danny and me, so I was happy he left. But reading the afterward in the book (this is where my lack of experience with McMurtry hurts me), the reviewer talks about this episode as McMurtry declaring the death of the Old West. We know that Danny has written a book much like McMurtry’s “Horseman, Pass By,” which I haven’t read yet, but do know that the movie “Hud,” one my favorites, was based on that novel. The film is about a young man who would’ve been a cowboy in an older era, but in the time he’s living in, he doesn’t have a range to ride on, and it destroys him.Danny is way too sensitive and odd to be a cowboy, but he, too, doesn’t have a place. At the end of the book, he begins to understand that he is permanently in the hinterland of life. He’ll never be in the center of any community, always an outsider, somewhere between normalcy and insanity (just like every great writer). And at the end of his speedy search for an Eve for his garden, which he does by sleeping with multiple women, multiple times in one night, he realizes that probably no one will ever reside in his world. You can’t help but wonder what happened to the dear, hapless Danny. I hope he found his peace, and finally drowned that bitch Sally.
There is a phenomenon out there known as Omaha Syndrome or, alternatively, The Omaha Complex. Google, for some reason, is not supporting me in this claim, but I am positive it exists. Omaha Syndrome, in a nutshell, refers to the fact that any and all Omahans have a near-encyclopedic knowledge of all people/things/events originating in Omaha and an astounding eagerness to share these facts with the world. Warren Buffet! Gerald Ford! 311! Gale Sayers! Marlon Brando! Malcolm X! (And obviously you all know about Chris Klein.) Perhaps this stems from a need to justify our existence to the rest of the world, or perhaps we just feel slighted by all the fancy coastal types, what with their $50 sunglasses and their Jos. A. Bank stores. Whatever the cause, it's real and I am not immune.Why do I bring this up? Well, my Omaha Syndrome way of thinking was probably the main reason I so enjoyed reading All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers. Larry McMurtry attended Rice (just like me!) and this book seems to be inspired by his experiences at that time in his life. Danny Deck, the main character, is a burgeoning and foolish young writer who is an undergrad at Rice University. I cannot really explain how happy I was when he talked about the location of his apartment or his time in the Rice library (I've been there!). The similarities didn't stop there. Later in the book, he moves out to San Francisco and just happened to live in the 6 block radius of that city with which I'm familiar. (Note: DC, I'm pretty sure that at one point Danny Deck wandered right by the apartment you and I looked at back in summer '08. You know, the one with the "privacy tree." I found great joy in that.) It's kind of pathetic that these loose parallels with my own life would so enhance my appreciation of the book -- and God help us all if I ever run across a book where "Alec" is the main character -- but I will not apologize. It's Omaha Syndrome.
What do You think about All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers (2002)?
I was inspired to go seek out Larry McMurtry’s novel, All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers after hearing Quentin Tarantino say that he had wanted to become a writer after reading this book. So I wanted to see what it was about the book that inspired him so. It is a bildungsroman, a sort of portrait of the artist as a young man. A young novelist, Danny Decker publishes his first novel which becomes optioned for a movie, not unlike McMurtry himself, who’s first novel Horseman, Pass By was made into the movie Hud. Along the way there is a lot of sex, drugs, and other types of hijinks. I’m guessing Tarantino thought that the lifestyle of a novelist, who is free to roam from Texas to California and back, was not a bad thing to strive for.It was poignant in some parts and entertaining in others, but generally sort of middlebrow literature in general. I liked this bit about the difference between tragedy and unhappiness: “I envy the victims of tragedy…They haven’t to feel guilty, or blame themselves for their own waste and the waste of others. War. Starvation. Loved ones dead before their time. The concentration camps. What do I have in common with people who have suffered such things? Nothing.”Apparently this novel marked a departure from his usual regional literature; I had read one of his earlier books, The Last Picture Show, after seeing the excellent Peter Bogdonovich film.
—Patrick McCoy
If Ellen Gilchrist were a man from Texas, I suspect she would write a book like this. It's a novel about highly intelligent, literate, and in the case of the central protagonist, literary characters who are also all deeply flawed and wounded in some way. It is often hard to pinpoint in what way exactly, but while there are moments in which the reader becomes angry or disgusted with a character because of how he or she behaves, in the end McMurtry handles all of his characters with compassion, grace, and humor, so it is hard not to like or at least sympathize with every major character in the story. As for the story, it is a twisted and twisting tale that begins and ends in South Texas but takes the reader to San Francisco, to New York, and to some strange nether-regions of the soul and spirit and the American West. The lead character, Danny Deck, is a writer who becomes an author with a major contract for his first book, but a man whose relationship to his progeny, both literary and biological, is ambiguous in the extreme. There are some terribly funny scenes and some genuinely heart-rending ones, but it's a hell of a ride and a hell of a read.
—Glen
I knew nothing of Larry McMurtry except that he was the Lonesome Dove guy prior to randomly picking this novel out of a little birdhouse-like lending library on the Detroit Riverfront. I like surprising myself at times, and this book was full of surprises. For one thing, if you think of him as an avuncular, old-fashioned purveyor of cowboy yarns, this relentlessly realistic and astringent view of life in the petit intelligentsia in the 1950s will make you wonder where that idea came from. Though they are not the focus of the story, racism, sexism, violence against women are depicted with a clear and discomfiting eye, and the main character's avoidant reaction to them is realistic and saddening. He's too wrapped up in his own life, full of miserating success, to really dwell on what he enables or fails to prevent. Imagine Gatsby from the perspective of Daisy.Mostly, it is the story of a guy for whom good luck only seems to cause bad luck. It's a comedy, for sure, and there is some great slapstick, but the laughs always come at a cost. There's tender relationship writing, moving depictions of emotional attachment, and a long streak of tragicomic self-destruction that seems pretty darn believable after everything that had gone before. Not very believable and kind of annoying after a while: the love life of the character. I believe there are two significant women in the narrative Danny doesn't bed. But, hey, I've never moved in those circles, so who knows. The novel has a very strong feeling of a roman-a-clef, so maybe it's all from experience.I powered through it in a couple days. Partly so I could leave the book behind in a lending library out west, but partly because the characters were very interesting companions on a solo trip. It says a lot for McMurtry's humanism that even the most detestable antagonists in the book were not unpleasant to spend my vacation with.I don't know that this book left me a McMurtry fan. I have zero or negative emotional investment in Texan culture and history, and McMurtry put most of his efforts into exploring them. But I'd certainly consider picking up another of his novels of late-twentieth century life. Larry seems to know something about people.P.S. I discovered while writing this that 'Terms of Endearment' is part of this continuity. Well, I'll be. Emma looks different onscreen.
—Jonathan
