MOVING ON

This double length, in fact King ranch styled novel, which moves in and out of Texas, is the publisher's lead book and you may remember McMurtry's earliest successes—Horseman Pass By (Hud) or The last Picture Show. Moving On is not really ahead except in commercial terms and it goes on and on in a smoothly styleless, emulsified fashion. Mostly with Patsy Carpenter, Jim—her mild-tempered husband of rather indefinite talents and professions, and Hank, a graduate student, who will become Patsy's lover (he loves her; she responds to him). Opening with a rodeo which Jim is photographing and introducing a number of characters you'll pick tip now and again (rich, self-indulgent Eleanor Guthrie: Sonny Shanks, a hotshot performer on the pills which will help to kill him; Joe Percy, a writer, etc., etc.). But most of the barebacked riding really takes place back in Houston and isolates what Patsy feels or doesn't feel in bed. Or toward Jim whom someone well defines as not knowing the difference between living and existing. As for Patsy, fastidious, disconsolate, prudish Patsy, she cries a great deal perhaps because she has too much time and too little sense of purpose. . . . The book essentially is hers and it goes along in a self-propelled fashion—you may find many people reading it and not remembering they have.