Books: A Memoir -- by Larry McMurtry

McMurtry's latest

Larry McMurtry's latest work is not a crowd pleaser, folks. Over at Amazon.com, where customers rate books on a scale of one-through-five stars, 13 of 28 customers award Books: A Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008; 259 pp; $24.00) three stars or less. Over at Barnes & Noble customers reacted in a similar way: one review awards the book two stars; another gives it four.

Books: A Memoir purports to be the autobiography of the fellow who leads 'the other life' of author Larry McMurtry. This fellow is not an author but a bookman from whom none of us has heard before. This is a man driven since childhood to collect books in the way that others collect guns or stamps or coins. In being such a memoir, it recalls collectors and books and authors, bookstore customers, booksellers -- a collection of the people and places and things that Bookman McMurtry's acquisitive bent has driven him to meet and to learn and to know and to deal with.

Describing my own feelings about Books: A Memoir, I should start with my impression that a number of the negative reviews I've read react to preconceived notions of what a McMurtry book 'ought to be' and do not consider this latest book on its own merits. Granted it is possible to compare, say, Anything for Billy to Lonesome Dove and rationally appreciate one over the other, there's no way to stand Books alongside McMurtry's western adventure fiction and measure it against that yardstick. Little of the humor, the swagger, the pathos that enliven McMurtry's western adventures is present in Books. When one encounters those things in Books they are muted, less substantial, harder to see and experience.

Readers who snuffle and bawl over the tragic end of Joe Lovelady or Jake Spoon are more apt to sneer at Bookman McMurtry, who is a less endearing protagonist. Whereas Joe and Jake are reckless, handsome bravos who score lots of women as they shoot, brawl, drink, gamble and swagger through their fictitious lives, Bookman's life is much less adventurous and Bookman's peers, according to McMurtry, are often grouchy, snappish, quasi-intellectual cranks who spend their lives and untold sums of money amassing vast collections of great and rare books. Tragedy strikes Jake and Joe when their bravado gets them killed. Tragedy strikes your typical bookman when he wakes up dead one morning, whereupon his inventory (and/or library) -- his great love and his life's work -- is broken up and sold in ragged chunks to unappreciative, mercenary strangers for pennies on the dollar. The tragedies of Books being thus Sisyphean and not Homeric, they are less easily recognized and consequently escape the notice of the idolatrous public. I think that is why, among negative reviews posted at Amazon.com, one sees remarks like these:

• "My favorite book by an American author is Lonesome Dove. The other books in that series are also wonderful. Books is not fiction but a look at the author's love of books and collecting books. This may be of more interest to the people with similar interests." (1 star)
• "I just finished reading this book and I come away disappointed. While there are a few semi-interesting anecdotes, in total they do not make for much of a book." (2 stars)
• "Most tellingly . . . he repeats, very often, anecdotes from his great book-length essay, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. Please, if you read this review, and haven't read that, DO NOT read Books, but rather go and get yourself a copy of Dairy Queen instead." (1 star)

Such reviews miss the fact that there are a couple of things to like about Books: A Memoir. The narrative tone is jovial and the narrator is easy to get along with. Until I started to sour on Books, I felt sorta like John O'Hanlan (James Stewart) riding horseback from Texas to Wyoming with Harvey Sullivan (Henry Fonda) riding alongside. On their way to take possession of something called The Cheyenne Social Club, John sat and listened while Harvey droned on, nonstop, for months, about his cousin's three-fingered kid sister and this ol' gal he used to date who could straddle two horses at the same time and that one, poor cowpoke who got kilt when some club-footed Swede totin' a hunnert pounds o' taters fell out of the sky and lit on him alluva sudden like, etc., ad infinitum.

In Books, narrator Bookman McMurtry drones along sorta like Harvey Sullivan. Bookman leads readers from Archer City, Texas, to Houston and Dallas and San Francisco and Denver and Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. and France and Italy and lots of other places before, at the end, he brings the reader back to Archer City. McMurtry's professional odyssey is less colorful than John O'Hanlan's long ride to Cheyenne. It could be just as interesting, but McMurtry fails to make it so.

Bookman McMurtry introduces readers to a host of people. There's any number of crankishly weird booksellers. One of them chased young McMurtry off the second floor of his shop. Another wouldn't let McMurtry touch any of his books but lent him binoculars with which to peruse the merchandise. There are plenty of others. We, the reading public, have never heard anything of any of these bookmen before, mind you. But several of them are eccentric in some way, and McMurtry tries to amuse us with their foibles.

Bookshop customers are also sometimes quirky: The late Alice Roosevelt Longworth, for example, occasionally popped into McMurtry's bookshop in Georgetown (The place that passes for Bohemia in Washington, D.C.). Sometimes she bought a book; sometimes she sold one. Then there's a woman named Sheri Martinelli. Deeply literate and generously rich, Martinelli was a friend of poets in her romantic youth. We meet her as an old lady sliding into poverty. She lives in a Winnebago with 400 personal letters from Ezra Pound, a bunch of cats and some rotten bananas.

Georgetown is a wonderful place for bookmen because it's full of old, rich, bookish types who obligingly die and leave marvelous libraries to be disposed of by their heirs. The heirs (and sellers generally) are often ignorant of books, of book prices, of technicalities such as issue points and other niceties of book collecting, and of literature generally. As a group, they are eager to sell and easily gulled. Large cities nationally provide happy hunting grounds for acquisitive bookmen, and Bookman McMurtry is definitely acquisitive.

The narrative voice is amiable, as I've already stated. My problem starts with the pace of the narration: Bookman McMurtry turns out to be a name-dropping maniac who is light on facts. In the first 29 pages, for instance, McMurtry lays more than 120 names on the reader. These are ordinary people, authors, publishers, bookmen, book titles, from Thomas Pynchon to Sancho Panza and Susan Sontag to 'Aunt Naomi Mitchell' and 'my dog Scraps.' Books: A Memoir is 219 pages long and by the time I got to the end of it my mind was a soup of names of people and places and books and things about which I knew next to nothing. Most of the people named are named because they bought or sold a book or knew some piece of trivia that McMurtry wanted to know. Then they vanish. If they ever figured in McMurtry's personal life, we are told something such as "they've been a friend these many years." That's very nearly as much of them (or of McMurtry) as we ever get. After checking up on myself by reading it a second time, I am sure: The biggest problem with Books: A Memoir is that there's nothing in it worth knowing.

In The Cheyenne Social Club, Harvey Sullivan's 6-month soliloquy has a purpose: it defines Harvey and John as characters -- as types, that is. Viewers have a good time along the way and, at the end of the five-minute travel montage, we know pretty well what to expect from John and Harvey as the plot develops. In Books: A Memoir, on the other hand, the soliloquy never stops and, being this is autobiography, there is no plot. Readers experience an avalanche of proper nouns and next to nothing else. Occasionally the narration provides a good time but, more typically, readers are starved of facts. Bookman McMurtry gives us narration to no purpose.

When the soliloquy ends on page 219, readers know almost nothing that they didn't know before reading page 1. Of McMurtry's personal life, for example: we know that he was married in the early 1960's. He sold his first novel, Horseman Pass By, for $10,000, to Hollywood in 1962. It was made into one of Paul Newman's most famous films, Hud. We know McMurtry has a son, born in 1962, who today is a singer/songwriter. He has cut 6 albums (titles not given), and McMurtry expects his son will do well in time (Question: Does such faint praise mean that those 6 albums all suck?). There is also a grandson. We also know the names of the son and the grandson. We know that McMurtry writes 10 pages of something every day of his life. His favorite book is Don Quixote. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are the prototypes of Gus and Call, in Loneseome Dove. We know that McMurtry has a personal library of 27,000 volumes. He is tired of fiction and doesn't care to read it any more. Instead he likes travelogues and books about world wars one and two. He has met and dealt with many interesting people, about whom he tells us next to nothing. He runs a bookstore called 'Booked Up' in Archer City, Texas, with a lifelong female business partner whom this 'memoir' names but does not discuss. The store has an inventory of some 300,000 volumes. Of book collecting and of the book trade itself, we know even less.

Just as annoying is the fact that there is no discernible plan. This book is not organized by date or by subject or in any other recognizable way. The narration wanders from 1962 to 1990, to 1975 and back again, seemingly at random. If, when you've done, you find you want to go back and read again about this person, that book, or some particular incident, your only option is to leaf through the book, scanning until you find what you're looking for. The huge number of names in this thing absolutely cries for an index, but there is none.

Bookman McMurtry calls that a memoir. I say it's damned little detail to draw from a life of more than 70 years and a career spanning more than 50. It's damned little to give readers who paid twenty-four bucks for an inside look at the life of so famous and successful an author as Larry McMurtry. Speaking strictly of Books: A Memoir, just because negative customer reviews at Amazon.com are poorly informed doesn't mean some of them aren't overly generous. Readers could learn nearly as much about McMurtry by reading Who's Who as they'll learn from this crummy book.

Jimmy sez "Save yer munny, folks. Thissun's a stinker."

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