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Roads

Name: Roads
Author: Larry McMurtry
ISBN: 9780786229697

by Larry McMurtry

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Overview

Larry McMurtry criscrosses America -- driving in search of the present, the past, and himself -- as he shares his fascination with this nation's great trails and the culture that has grown up on either side of them.

Ever since he was a boy growing up in Texas only a mile from Highway 281, Larry McMurtry has felt the pull of the road. His town was thoroughly landlocked, making the highway his "river, its hidden reaches a mystery and an enticement. I began my life beside it and I want to drift down the entire length of it before I end this book..."

And in Roads McMurtry embarks on a cross-country trip where his route is also his destination. As he drives, McMurtry reminisces about the places he's seen, the people he's met, and the books he has read, including more than 3,000 about travel. He describes why episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show might be the best place to find joie de vivre in Minnesota; the scenic differences between Routes 35 and I-80; which vigilantes lived in Montana and which hailed from Idaho; and the history of Lewis and Clark, Sitting Bull, and Custer that still haunt Route 2 today.

From South Florida to North Dakota, from Eastern Long Island to Oregon, Roads is travel writing at its best.

About the Author, Larry McMurtry

Larry McMurtry is the author of twenty-nine novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove, three memoirs, two collections of essays, and more than thirty screenplays. He lives in Archer City, Texas.

Biography

Back in the late 60s, the fact that Larry McMurtry was not a household name was really a thorn in the side of the writer. To illustrate his dissatisfaction with his status, he would go around wearing a T-shirt that read "Minor Regional Novelist." Well, more than thirty books, two Oscar-winning screenplays, and a Pulitzer Prize later, McMurtry is anything but a minor regional novelist.

Having worked on his father's Texas cattle ranch for a great deal of his early life, McMurtry had an inborn fascination with the West, both its fabled history and current state. However, he never saw himself as a life-long rancher and aspired to a more creative career. He achieved this at the age of 25 when he published his first novel. Horseman, Pass By was a wholly original take on the classic western. Humorous, heartbreaking, and utterly human, this story of a hedonistic cowboy in contemporary Texas was a huge hit for the young author and even spawned a major motion picture starring Paul Newman called Hud just two years after its 1961 publication. Extraordinarily, McMurtry was even allowed to write the script, a rare honor for such a novice.

With such an auspicious debut, it is hard to believe that McMurtry ever felt as though he'd been slighted by the public or marginalized as a minor talent. While all of his books may not have received equal attention, he did have a number of astounding successes early in his career. His third novel The Last Picture Show, a coming-of-age-in-the-southwest story, became a genuine classic, drawing comparisons to J. D. Salinger and James Jones. In 1971, Peter Bogdonovich's screen adaptation of the novel would score McMurtry his first Academy award for his screenplay. Three years later, he published Terms of Endearment, a critically lauded urban family drama that would become a hit movie starring Jack Nicholson and Shirley MacLaine in 1985.

That year, McMurtry published what many believe to be his definitive novel. An expansive epic sweeping through all the legends and characters that inhabited the old west, Lonesome Dove was a masterpiece. All of the elements that made McMurtry's writing so distinguished -- his skillful dialogue, richly drawn characters, and uncanny ability to establish a fully-realized setting -- convened in this Pulitzer winning story of two retired Texas rangers who venture from Texas to Montana. The novel was a tremendous critical and commercial favorite, and became a popular miniseries in 1989.

Following the massive success of Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry's prolificacy grew. He would publish at least one book nearly every year for the next twenty years, including Texasville, a gut-wrenching yet hilarious sequel to The Last Picture Show, Buffalo Girls, a fictionalized account of the later days of Calamity Jane, and several non-fiction titles, such as Crazy Horse.

Interestingly, McMurtry would receive his greatest notoriety in his late 60s as the co-screenwriter of Ang Lee's controversial film Brokeback Mountain. The movie would score the writer another Oscar and become one of the most critically heralded films of 2005. The following year he published his latest novel. Telegraph Days is a freewheeling comedic run-through of western folklore and surely one of McMurtry's most inventive stories and enjoyable reads. Not bad for a "minor regional novelist."

Good To Know

A miniseries based on McMurtry's novel Comanche Moon is currently in production. McMurtry co-wrote the script.

The first-printing of McMurtry's novel In a Narrow Grave is one of his most obscure for a rather obscure reason. The book was withdrawn because the word "skyscrapers" was misspelled as "skycrappers" on page 105.

McMurtry comes from a long line of farmers and ranchers. His father and eight of his uncles were all in the profession.

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Editorials

From Barnes & Noble

Larry McMurtry, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lonesome Dove, sets out to "reread" his favorite roads through a series of explorations on America's great highways. A combination of travel essays, personal history, literary historiography, and soul searching, Roads is a fantastic, contemplative read.

The premise of Roads is a recounting of several thousand-mile-plus journeys McMurtry takes around America in 1999. "My method, to the extent that I have one, is modeled on rereading; I want to reread some of the roads as I might a book," he writes. It's perfect that this bibliophile uses this metaphor to explain his desire to explore America’s highways and byways.

A man born to a long line of cowboys and farmers, McMurtry feels a profound connection to land and places. And as a writer, reader, and book connoisseur, McMurtry feels a similarly intense connection to places that inspire authors, or places where different works of literature are set. "As a rule, I'm not much inclined to pilgrimage, literary or otherwise," McMurtry writes, but that statement is only half true. McMurtry may not be inclined to pilgrimage, but Roads does read like the road trip version of a literary pub crawl. McMurtry's road trips are very much a retracing of steps and the written word. They're also an opportunity for McMurtry to get in touch with himself. Although he says early on in the book that he's not interested in finding himself, nor is he running from or towards something (as is so often the motivation of travelers). He is interested in giving himself the opportunity to muse, mull, and reflect on who he is, where he's been, what he's seen, and what he'd like to do. McMurtry ends his road tripping by leaving the reader with the types of soul-searching questions that signify a man about to embark on a new beginning. I can hardly wait for his next work to get a sense of what the answers might be.

Freelancer Emily Burg is based New York.

Library Journal

McMurty, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Lonesome Dove and Oscar for the screenplay for The Last Picture Show, has now delved into the "on the road" genre. He covers most of the country with the exception of the Northeast (reflecting a dislike of I-95) and limits his roads to primarily interstate highways, usually flying to some point in the United States, renting a car, and driving back via the interstates to his home in Archer City, TX. Along the way, he comments on writers indigenous to the area, his own books and screenplays, his likes and dislikes, and his own life. On the whole, there is nothing exceptional here-the best chapter in the book concerns the dirt roads of the author's youth. Recommended only for libraries with a large demand for the author's fiction and those that wish to provide some supplemental autobiographical material on McMurtry. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/00]-John McCormick, New Hampshire State Lib., Concord

Don McLeese

By McMurtry's own admission, this isn't much of a road book. As driver and author, McMurtry opts for speeding along the nation's superhighways rather than meandering through the picturesque countryside. He gets where he's going with a minimum of human interaction. He eats fast food and stays in chain motels (a lifetime tally of "more than two hundred Holiday Inns, from which the last thing I expect is a surprise"). He bypasses New Orleans ("not in the mood") and Denver ("I'd rather not") and considers the whole of Missouri "a place to get through as rapidly as possible." So why should the reader want to crisscross the country with such an ornery cuss? Because his meditations on travel writing and the relationship between landscape and literature are particularly acute, his understanding of beach and border towns is incisive and even his scattershot volleys (does the Midwest really spawn mass murderers because of a glamour deficiency?) have a provocative spin to them. This is most valuable as a travelogue inside an engaging writer's mind, a continuation of his recent piecemeal autobiography, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, and a sequel of sorts to 1968's more Texas-centric In a Narrow Grave.

Kirkus Reviews

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist McMurtry (Duane's Depressed, 1998, etc.) takes a rambling bookman's holiday on America's great interstates, hoping to "reread some of these roads as I might a book." Surprisingly for someone whose work brims with colorful characters that almost burst through the confines of the printed page, McMurtry is uninterested in meeting and depicting people in the areas through which he travels. Instead, he tries to "treat the great roads as rivers, floating down this one, struggling up that one, writing about these riverboats as I find them, and now and then, perhaps, venturing a comment about the land beside the road." Landscapes, natural or manmade, elicit some of his sharpest descriptions. Although he scorns Missouri and the hot, woebegone town of Why, Arizona, his prose vibrates with rhapsodic intensity when explaining why the Gateway Arch in St. Louis is so stunning, or how the light in Tucson flows over the mountains like "a river of bright air." An antiquarian book dealer for almost as long as he's been a published novelist, McMurtry sprinkles comments on numerous authors along the way, ranging from the overrated (Hemingway) to the now-neglected (e.g., Hamlin Garland, William Allen White, Janet Lewis). Neither his eye nor his memory misses many of the ironies in modern life—such as Hollywood's new breed of 20-something studio executives, or barefooted rock star John Mellencamp driving him from the Indianapolis Airport in his new Jaguar. Most movingly, places evoke in McMurtry melancholy recollections of loss (such as the world of slow dirt roads in which he grew up in Texas) and even (in Hagerstown, Maryland) therealization,following heart surgery, that "a part of me—perhaps most of me—seemed to have died, been lost, vanished, slipped away." Seldom deep, McMurtry's driver's-seat ruminations are unlikely to win him new fans, but his prose unwinds in a deceptively simple, winning manner.

From the Publisher

Manuel Luis Martinez Chicago Tribune Roads is a travel narrative of the first order...a wonderful journey...a compelling invitation to rediscover what is lasting, important, and true.

Bill Hoffmann New York Post Roads adds to [McMurtry's] pot of literary gold...among the best American road stories ever written.

Jonathan Yardley The Washington Post Book World Reflective and appealing...the greatest pleasure of this journey is simply to be in the company of a lively and wholly unconventional mind.