LOOP GROUP
By Larry McMurtry.
Simon & Schuster. 242 pp. $25
"Loop Group" is the story of two plucky ladies who see life passing them by and stubbornly dig in their heels. Maggie and Connie are either looking at 60 or a little bit past it. They've been best friends since the sixth grade, which means they've been together against the world for round about 50 years, longer than most marriages.
Their "real" marriages have been a little iffy. Connie's union with a lowlife has produced a son, a drugged-out and apathetic specimen who barely gets by in some pitiful job at a library.
Maggie's husband was a bigamist, but she has three strapping, grown daughters, each with a little more energy than is good for her. Kate, the oldest, is a bossy termagant; Jeannie, the middle one, has taken up adultery as a serious hobby; Meagan, the youngest, is a sniveling, whining tattletale. Seeing that their mother is depressed -- she has just undergone a hysterectomy -- they gang up on her like ravening wolves. When they're not badgering her en masse to pull herself up by her high-heeled bootstraps, they take turns calling her on their cell phones and retailing every detail of their not-very-interesting lives.
Maggie's only salvation is a little business she owns and operates, a "loop group." For those who don't live in Hollywood or who don't care one way or the other, looping is the art of providing extra sound effects in movies. (When someone once filmed a commercial in my front yard, the ad men thought bird loops were called for, and the recorded songs of hyperactive birds resounded for hours around the neighborhood.)
Loopers, like grips, script persons and camera boom operators, are indispensable to the film industry but far down on the cinematic social scale. Maggie's loop group is made up of alcoholics, drug addicts and one pedophile, but she loves them dearly and tries to keep them out of jail as they journey through Hollywood providing cowboy yips and sounds of party revelry for various budget movies.
At home, Maggie and Connie bicker, smoke pot, worry about their credit card balances. Connie is winding up a romance with a man called Bobcat; Maggie is just starting one with her 80-year-old Sicilian shrink. The women while away their time shopping at Nordstrom and eating at Musso & Frank's, where the ancient waiters love them.
Maggie gets the idea to visit her Aunt Cooney, who lives in a small town in Texas and owns 2 million chickens. Why not? Maggie's kids are being particularly tiresome, and her shrink's wife is suspicious. At this point, "Loop Group" turns into a Larry McMurtry novel. Maggie and Connie go on the road, where they meet some very miscellaneous people and have some very miscellaneous adventures. They stock up on snakebite kits and a gun or two. They meet a dubious bearded guy who knew them back in the golden days of Hollywood, but they cleverly ditch him. They are treated kindly by the Hopi but mercilessly fleeced by the Navajo. They -- almost by accident -- stop by Canyon de Chelly and are duly blown away by its magnificence. They buy onyx jewelry and indigenous pottery. They experience the joy of open air, of mysterious America, but only tangentially: They are women, after all, and they spend most of their road time in snits or crying fits or talking on their cell phones to their kids back home.
Aunt Cooney is a stock McMurtry character. She lives alone, if you don't count her 2 million chickens or her movie-star-beautiful grandson, who was trained as a chef in the big city by Wolfgang Puck and cooks up extraordinary dishes for his granny and her visitors. Aunt Cooney's turreted castle -- which seems a bit like McMurtry's own spread in Archer City -- is filled with western memorabilia. She and the ladies talk; Aunt Cooney soon takes offense. She kicks them out, and Maggie and Connie drive home.
There's a lordly carelessness about some of this. Maggie thinks of taking a room at the Ambassador to be with her lover, but that hotel has been closed for decades. They talk about the highway they drive to Texas as being the freeway to Las Vegas, but that stops being true when they turn off toward Needles. The author, of course, wouldn't even blink at these caveats. And if he doesn't care, why should we? If Maggie and Connie are nitwits, should we object? Nitwits need love and stories, too.
What do you do after you've written "Lonesome Dove," which, for my money, puts "Moby-Dick" in some serious shade? What do you do if you've written the Great American Novel and still have the rest of your life to live? If you think of literature as medicine for the soul, first do no harm. "Loop Group" does no harm.
