Patsy -- young, beautiful, with a sharp tongue and an irresistible charm -- and her shiftless husband, Jim, are adrift in the West. Patsy moves through affairs of the heart like small towns -- there's Pete, the rodeo clown, and Hank, the graduate student, and others -- always in search of the life that seems ever receding around the next bend.

Peopled with a riotously colorful cast of highbrows, cowpokes, and rodeo queens, in its wry humor, tenderness, and epic panorama, Moving On is a celebration of our land by one of America's best-loved authors. Moving On is vintage McMurtry.

There's more than a bit of Henry Miller in much of the novel, as characters attempt to match up their levels of sexual passion, often finding that they are rarely feeling the same thing for each other at the same time. Seduction is often unsuccessful or unsatisfying, a rendezvous full of romantic promise may turn into an argument leaving both parties exhausted. A pass made after several drinks at a party or over a milk shake at a soda fountain may elicit an exchange of bitterness and barbed recriminations. A married couple talks openly of their infidelities. A wife accuses her husband of being neglectful, while she routinely meets a colleague of his for sex.

For readers who like action and narrative development, this book will seem very slow going. For some, the many shifts of mood and ironies of thwarted intentions will make the story seem flat and the central characters unfocused. By contrast, the marginal characters, especially an old widowed rancher, a rodeo clown and his young barrel-racer girlfriend, and a teenage bronc rider spring from the page fully realized. A few scenes are pumped up with melodrama (a professor's wife breaks down in front of the girl her husband has tried to seduce; a champion rodeo cowboy refuses to accept that a ranch-owning woman he's been bedding is growing tired of him; a pregnant young woman is rescued from a drugged existence with a sinister boyfriend). But the most crisply vivid and emotionally honest scenes involve the death and burial of an old man in the nearly treeless prairie northwest of Dallas. They're simple and understated like the country folks who people these pages.

McMurtry says that this novel emerged from an image of a young woman in a car eating a melted chocolate bar. What follows that image is one thing after another, until we reach the end almost 800 pages later, and that same woman, now divorcing her husband, feels a kind of independence that may never surrender itself to another man. Some readers will find this ending worth the trip; others may find themselves, like McMurtry's characters, in a somewhat different mood.


The first of McMurtry's Houston books ...   January 24, 1999
 9 out of 9 found this review helpful

To correct and amplify on some of the earlier reviews -- As Wagner's 'Ring' is a prologue followed by a trilogy, Larry McMurtry's Houston books are a trilogy followed by a epilogue -- in chronological order, 'Moving On', 'All My Friends Are Going to be Strangers', 'Terms of Endearment', and 'The Evening Star'. After McMurtry attended Texas Tech University, he went to graduate school in English at Rice University in Houston, where he lived and taught in the late '60s - early '70s. These novels are a perfect historical & sociological mirror of the time & place (I was there, too), but more than that they are stories of memorable, completely developed, fully complex characters lost between an old & mythical Texas of ranches & rodeos and the new urban Texas fueled by big money, real estate & oil. Is there a more memorable character than Patsy Carpenter in contemporary American literature? She cries a lot -- oh, does she cry -- but she cries because she is lost, alone & confused, and McMurtry never backs away from or softens his portrayal of her despair. We intimately know her family & friends, their loves, affairs, betrayals and kindnesses, and they quickly become believable, fully human, and known. This is a long book and, in musical terms, stays mostly between mezzo-piano & mezzo-forte -- short on dramatic plot development and cathartic climaxes. But 'Moving On' is a beautifully developed portrait of a group of almost-real people, and you will remember them for a long, long time.


A Grand Achievement   September 23, 2003
 8 out of 8 found this review helpful

I am in the process of rereading Moving On and just checked Amazon for other readers' comments, which I found intriguing. I originally bought this book for two reasons: 1.)I'm a Larry McMurtry fan and 2.) I was interested in the rodeo aspects of the book. I was initially disappointed when Jim and Patsy left the rodeo circuit for the "desperation of suburban Houston," but I finished the book anyway. When I picked it up again recently, I intended only to reread the rodeo-related passages, and now (deep into the Houston section)I find I can't stop reading. McMurtry's creation of Patsy Carpenter is a grand achievement. Her endless crying aside, she is one of the most completely realized characters in contemporary literature. I can't think of any other novel that chronicles with such convincing precision the moment by moment emotional life of a single character. There are times, certainly, when I find her annoying, but she is also endlessly compelling. The other characters (Pete, Eleanor, Sonny)are a great added treat in the novel, but it is ultimately Patsy who impresses, and it is for the creation of her that we should consider Moving On one of McMurtry's best works. (P.S. to the earlier reviewer who gave the book a "lone star," what you say about the Waggoner ranch is very true. The descriptions are so beautiful that you want to move there (but then it functions as a kind of oasis in the book), and Roger is a touching character whose simple language belies great depth. McMurtry has created him with great affection.)


Just like the flag of Texas - A Lone Star   August 22, 2001
 5 out of 14 found this review helpful

At the time McMurtry started this novel, he had established himself as a regional writer of some talent. His first three novels were turned into screenplays, and two of them, "Hud" and "The Last Picture Show," did quite well at the box office and with the critics. Perhaps to shed this regionalist mantle, McMurtry began writing what would be a series of "urban" novels centered on characters associated with the Houston area. After reading the first of his urban novels, I think that he should have stayed with the subject matter he knows best: the frontier areas of Texas. Very seldom have I encountered a novel that was so misconceived, overblown, and poorly written.

It is as if McMurtry had two novels in mind when he began writing: one about rodeo and the other about graduate study at Rice University. That he tried to combine the two themes into one novel was foolhardy. The amalgam that resulted is a strange creation (almost embarrassing), imploying all the hackneyed tricks of pulp writers: the incongruous interconnection of characters, unbelievable crux moments, and titillation. Thus you have a world champion rodeo star, a Black Panther type, an English professor at Rice, graduate students, a cattle queen, a Hollywood screen writer, a rodeo clown, hippies and an overbearing Houston socialite all sharing each other's lives. Such unlikely relationships result in even more unlikely denouements.

His main character is Patsy Carpenter, a sort of trust fund debutante with no visible means of support who spends her life worrying about what "fetching" or "wild" outfit to wear; how to furnish her new home (formerly owned, it just so happens, by the Rice English professor); taking care of her baby; giving orders to her maid; rescuing her drugged out sister from Haight-Ashbury (naturally); matching witicisms with her acquaintances; learning how to be an adultress; trying to decide to divorce her shiftless husband; reading all the important authors (boy, those Texans can read); and crying. In fact, she cries so much that she could easily replenish half the empty tanks in West Texas. No wonder Jim ran off to California with that red headed siren, Clara Clark (love those alliterations).

But I think I might have been able to at least accept some of the improbabilities of the novel if it had been better written. McMurtry has talent and has a fine sense of place. When he writes about the Wagonner ranch, he brings the reader along. His descriptions of early morning at the ranch are wonderful. Everything he writes about becomes palpable, from sound to smell. Unfortunately, the ranch scenes represent an infintesimal proportion when compared to the rest of this huge, rambling book. More frequently, McMurtry is content with describing banalities and making very poor literary witicisms. These drove me to distraction and filled the novel. Just to give an example from the last chapter. He writes of "motherly mouthings" and "being dogmatic about dogs." I'm sure the author felt that these would bring smiles to the faces of his readers. To me, they were like fingernails on a chalkboard.

My biggest question was whether to give this book one or two stars. I tried to remember all the redeeming qualities of the book, trying to be judicious in my judgement (God, McMurtry is rubbing off on me!) but could only think of all the time wasted reading this book when I could have been enjoying other things. Sorry, Larry. Just like the flag of Texas: a lone star.


Big, Messy, Heartfelt and Wonderful   March 9, 2000
 3 out of 4 found this review helpful

This is a big, wandering book -- but one whose length is justified by the in-depth exploration of its main character, the unforgettable Patsy Carpenter. Like a lot of McMurtry books, it's sad and funny and imbued with a deep sympathy for people's flaws and foibles and the situations they somehow get themselves into and then can't get out of. If you're in a relationship that's ended, is ending, or that might end soon, you'll find this book to be a bittersweet mirror. It won't help you figure out what to do, but boy will you recognize your own situation.