Customer Reviews

Loop Group

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(27)

 

 

I am really angry with myself for actually finishing this book. It was so bad, I kept thinking, "But this is Larry McMurtry - he'll tie it all up and salvage something out of this mess!"

He doesn't. From the first sentence to the last, this is the most empty, vapid, uninspiring, inane book I've ever read. This is my first review, and I was not happy to find that I had to give it at least 1 star.

I love kooky, unconventional characters. But there has to be some reason for them, and some imagination used in writing them. The "Zany characters" you meet in this book are empty and uninteresting. Every single character in this book is driven solely by their basest instincts. There's even a determined and relentless child molester, who is treated as just another zany character. The main characters can't manage to summon so much as a whiff of disapproval for their pederastic friend, and no sympathy is to be found for his 9-year-old victim.

There is no pacing to the plot. Once the big road trip finally started, I kept thinking that something worth writing about will happen any time now... instead, suddenly the trip is over. Then, after the return... nothing happens.

Character development? Maggie and Connie are the two most self-centered, vacuous, clueless old ladies you'll eve meet - and just as much so at the end of the book as they are at the beginning.

I have reached a whole new level of respect for professional book reviewers... zero. Seeing the glowing reviews of this steaming heap of feces is just pathetic. There. I think I'm done now. I felt I had to redeem my time, if even a little, by doing what I can to help steer as many people as I can away from this book.

...I was stuck on a long international flight with a flight magazine that hadn't been changed since my flight out, a movie I'd already seen (twice), and a dead battery on my mp3 player.
Otherwise, after the first chapter I'd have used it to wipe down the basin as a courtesy to the next passenger, then watched it disappear in a rush of blue water.

I don't know who these people who write the cover blurbs are, but I suspect that the publisher knows some very embarrassing secrets about them. And I know for sure that the reviewer who had the nerve to say this is McMurtry's best book since "Terms of Endearment" has never read that book, though he may have seen the pale shadow of a (critically acclaimed -hello-) movie that was made from it.

I'm thinkin' that Larry is dead and whomever found the body put together this book from the gleanings of his old notebooks and wastebasket contents.
Because that's what it seems like - a collection of vague ideas, impotent plot outlines, and blurry sketches of characters either too similar to ones used in previous novels (the chicken farmer aunt,for instance, is archetypical of McMurtry's crazy-like-foxes old codger Texans), or characters not fully fleshed out. The protagonist Maggie herself, never does get colored all the way in, so that you end the book with a "yeah, so?" feeling. You don't know or care any more about her by the last sentence than you did in the first. Too, the text is afflicted with cliche and overused adjectives. "Vast" is a favorite- it describes everything from pots of pasta to areas of desert. And there are many little inconsistences of the type that make me wonder if the editors were illiterate or apathetic. Probably both.

"Loop Group" is a huge disappointment. Please, if you want to read a McMurty book, try another: "All My Friends are Going to Be Strangers," "Lonesome Dove," or "Anything for Billy", or any of the other westerns. Perhaps "Terms of Endearment." Those are books that can change your life just because they make you know things you didn't know before.

Maybe the existence of this book is a perfect example of why creativity can't be motivated by contract obligations.

To each their own, but you do have to wonder.... all of the good reviews here come across as professional writing. Like professional payback or something. When you get down to regular people telling what they think of the story of depressed Maggie taking her wacky best friend Connie on a fun filled trip across California to Texas, it hits the mark.

If you had taken Larry McMurtry's name off of this book you would not have been able to convince me he actually wrote this drivel. You want to whack Maggie across the head and tell her to act her age or even like a mature 25 year old and get a life. Connie is so disagreeable I couldn't see how someone could be around her for two minutes much less be friends since sixth grade. This is a childish book about childish grown-ups and the only emotion it stirred up in me was the regret I wasted my time reading about two 60 year old wasting theirs.

Thankfully this book came to me in a big cardboard box with lots of other loaners... I struggled through this novel thinking that I must be missing something... afterall, LARRY MCCURTY is a Pulitzer Prize winner! Did he really write this??? I have never read his work before - though I've seen screen productions of several. Imagine this in living color at your local Cineplex! I'd need REALLY good popcorn and plenty of it. Boring. Repetitive. Pointless. Did I say repetitive? Where was this man's thesaurus??? And an aside, the dustcover... The review from Newsday "[McCurty]is one of the few male authors who can write convincingly from the woman's point of view." RUBBISH! On the contrary, his female characters are demeaning representations -insulting and unconvincing. This book is nonsense - a waste of time. Did I mention repetitive?

Thank goodness I borrowed this book from the library and didn't actually buy it. I've ready many of McMurtry's books and loved or liked most of them. Never have I actually hated one--until now.
It began, for me, with the very first paragraph: "Maggie was rummaging fretfully in her small pantry, wondering why in the world she could never remember to buy tea bags, when she happened to glance out the window just in time to see her daughter Kate's enormous SUV whip into her driveway and stop. That was a little surprising--it was Sunday morning, only about ten o'clock, and Kate was a lazybones who normally did not bestir herself much on Sunday morning. Besides which, Kate lived in Marina del Rey--what was she doing in Hollywood at such an early hour?"
My God--that's dreadful. Only someone who had no fear of being rejected would actually begin a book that way. I thought it would get better. It didn't.
I'm betting this was a book contracted for and not delivered until way past deadline. Better to have paid back the advance and burned the darned thing at Midnight.
I'm going to try and forget this little lapse and go back and read "Lonesome Dove" and "Last Picture Show". Maybe Mr. McMurtry ought to go back and do the same.

Then you'll LOVE this crap!

It's official, kids: Larry McMurtry done lost his mind. Or perhaps has had a lobotomy. Because I'm sure as death and taxes that this is NOT the same guy who wrote the uncompromising, compelling and heart-wrenching Lonesome Dove series (in point of fact, the only Westerns I've ever whole-heartedly loved). Actually, I think the explanation might be that he lost a drunken bet with his agent. Or owed money to the mob? Surely he's not just mindlessly bent on the destruction of the American novel and his reputation as a whole. Surely.

Other reviews have summed up the awfulness pretty well, but I'll add this: If I wanted to watch two boring old women smoke pot, talk about nothing and drink vodka, I'd pay more visits to my Aunt Lucille and her "special friend", "Aunt" Casey, in Ft. Lauderdale. By the end of the book, you'll wish you could at least wrest some of the drugs and booze from the characters' gnarled old fingers for sheer relief.

McMurtry begins with two 60 year old women who are nowhere and ends...yep, you got it - nowhere. How boring! I never cared about the characters and more importantly they didn't do anything interesting if I had. There is NOTHING at stake in this novel. I think this is primarily because the main character doesn't really care about ANYTHING. [...]. The clerk at Books-a-million warned me and said, "he just didn't seem to take his time with it". I think she was right. Either McMurtry is over the hill or he just cranked this out to meet a deadline, in either case I feel like I was cheated out of my time and my money.

I have never written a book review before, but this book was such a waste of time, I'm angry with myself for finishing it. I have loved Larry McMurtry's Wild West style books, and kept thinking that it HAD to get better. It doesn't. If you read this book, the impressions you are left with are:

a) Women are completely inept at running their own lives
b) Women either have to save the world or be a parasite on their female friends or relatives
c) "She burst into tears" is somehow acceptable every other page.

When the pedophile who has just had sex with a 9-year old and complains that he should have picked up a street urchin instead of a boy from an important family is painted to be a sympathetic character, I lost what little hope I had for the book. It was near the incredibly disappointing ending, or I would have quit in the middle.

Larry McMurty's name got this published. Unfortunately, it ruins the reputation of that same name. Perhaps this is why famous authors publish under different names. It would have been a good idea for Larry.

Ok,as a Larry McMurtry fan, I just got done with his trilogy about Thalia. Wonderful stories. Of course I read Lonesome Dove, Terms of Endearment, and all of his classics.

This book sucked. First of all, it was weirdly sexual, pointless, and the themes were just a bad copy of the good books he's written. This is the worst book he has ever written, and no one should read it. It was just a pointless story that was obviously his last book he needed to fill his quota to his publisher.

McMurtry's writing is wonderful, as always. What a shame he has nothing really to say.