All My Friends are Going to be Strangers [Paperback]

Larry McMurty (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: University of New Mexico; reprint edition (1972)
• ASIN: B000GQQ228
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,565,282 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Larry McMurtry is the author of twenty-nine novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove. His other works include two collections of essays, three memoirs, and more than thirty screenplays, including the coauthorship of Brokeback Mountain, for which he received an Academy Award. His most recent novel, When the Light Goes, is available from Simon & Schuster. He lives in Archer City, Texas.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

58 of 62 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Texas beatniks of the Sixties, August 19, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers (Audio Cassette)

This novel, McMurtry's fourth, is his most tender and charming. Danny Deck is a young, perpetually perplexed writer to whom things seem to inexplicably happen, yet Danny, who narrates the novel, never presents himself as a victim, and McMurtry successfully keeps the novel from becoming sentimental. McMurtry's finest achievement in this novel, however, is his evocation of a Texas no one else has ever written about--the young, academic, urban, sixties generation of Texans. If you didn't believe such a thing existed, this novel will convince you otherwise. That world gives this novel a funky charm (its frank sexual content was somewhat controversial in some circles when it was published.) Look for the usual McMurtry themes and characteristics, including well-drawn women characters and a perverse spin on the "old cattleman" in the character of mean-as-hell, 92 year old Uncle Laredo, who "was obsessed with last things." Chapter Thirteen, which concerns Danny's visit to Uncle Laredo out in Van Horn on his way back from San Francisco, is one of the funniest pieces of writing I've ever read, one of the very few times I've actually laughed out loud reading a book. The book is the first of a trilogy (which years later became a tetralogy, then a quinology, etc.) written in the late sixties and early seventies along with "Moving On" and "Terms of Endearment." It's my favorite of all of McMurtry's novels

30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is NOT a western!!!, January 14, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers : A Novel (Paperback)

One of the best books ever written. This is McMurtry at his finest. I have missed Danny Deck (main character) since I read the last line of this novel. This is the first McMurtry book I ever read. I later read every fictional book he wrote just to hear his "voice" again. This says volumes seeing that I normally have no interest in western genre; but I'll read the western ones because I grow to care for his characters as they dance off of the pages. After reading this book you should also read Terms of Endearment, Evening Star and Moving On for some of the same characters. This book really should become a film. Thank you Mr. McMurtry!!!

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Portrait Of A Writer As A Young Man, September 9, 2008

By 

Alfred Johnson (boston, ma) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers : A Novel (Paperback)

As is usually the case when I get excited about an author's work I tend to delve into all the work in order to see which way he or she is heading. That is the case here with Larry McMurtry. I have just finished reading his The Last Picture Show trilogy (The Last Picture Show; Texasville; and, Duane's Depressed) about coming of age in small town Texas, having one's mid-life crisis there and, in the end, struggling against the strains of mortality there, as well. The cumulative effect of this work was a five-star review. Here we step back to early McMurtry and while the promise is certainly there as well as his quirky look at modern life this is the work of a rising author star not of a master writer.

Why? Well, for one thing the subject matter. All fictional writing in the final analysis may be autobiographical, consciously or unconsciously, but here the trials and tribulations of a young Texas writer who heads to California to find himself after the first budding of prominence with the publication of his first book and a movie offer is, well, just a little too precious. Moreover, the inevitable romantic problems of twenty-something males (and, by now in 2008, females) has been done to death. Nothing really jumps out here other than some cogent observations about the foibles of human nature as strained through the California blender. My advice to Danny, the protagonist writer here is -Go east, young man, go east back to Texas. That's where your pot of gold is, Larry, oops Danny. Do you need to read this book? If you have time. Do you need to read The Last Picture Show trilogy. Damn right. That's the different in a nutshell.