Looping back

In his memoir Hollywood, author Larry McMurtry writes that he considers Loop Group a better novel than Lonesome Dove, his Pulitzer Prize-winner. This surprised me, for I had a low opinion of Loop Group when I read it soon after it was published in 2004. I decided to give Loop Group another try, this time with the Recorded Books version narrated by actress C.J. Critt.

My vote still goes with Lonesome Dove, but I now admit I badly underestimated the later novel. I had remembered it as a rather mindless “hero takes a journey” story with two mature women in a comic version of Thelma and Louise. I discovered on my second encounter with the novel that it is far from mindless, and while Maggie and Connie, the two women who have been best friends since sixth grade, do take a journey (from Hollywood to Texas), most of the action takes place close to home.

Both women, whether married or not, have been on the prowl for lovers since they were 12-year-olds. Now they are 60 and determined not to turn into matrons. But Maggie has just had a hysterectomy and is in the dumps. She doubts if any man will ever desire her again. She has never strayed far from Hollywood in her life, but she wonders if a road trip, perhaps to visit her one surviving aunt in Texas, might revive her spirits. Connie has no interest in going to a Texas, but she can’t bear being separated from Maggie.

Maggie heads a loop group that provides background voices for minor Hollywood films. Freeing herself of her obligations to her group, as well as to her three grown daughters, slows her departure, as does the sudden realization that she is in love with her longtime analyst.

The novel’s title, we come to realize, refers to more than just Maggie’s group. There is her and Connie’s looping and loopy drive to Texas and back. There’s the way Connie, her daughters and others tend to go round in circles, with Maggie at their center. And there is the way the entire novel seems to travel in a loop, returning Maggie and Connie to where they began, two hot, very unmatronly, on-the-prowl women.

The novel is fun, if naughty fun, but it is also a fine work of literature. But better than Lonesome Dove? I think not.