All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers by Larry McMurtry

2 Stars

The door to ordinary places was the door that I had missed.

Good lord, this is a wandering tale of a naive and rather stupid young man, Danny Deck. It's non-stop grasping at straws--straws being women, women that he fucks and loses. Over and over again. I think part of this is very much a time piece, and I get that it's suppose to be this spectacle of characters, but the characters are too much of a spectacle. Yes, everyone is lost and broken--you're not unique, Danny. Anyway, the characters read like stereotypes. 

Danny has one moment of true action, self-motivated direction instead of aimlessness and it made me laugh. Go all in.

"Where's Geoffrey?" he asked.
"I just threw him off the patio," I said.

Needless to say, I didn't enjoy this. I kept hoping that it would have this great reveal moment, but that never happened, for me at least. Maybe I was disillusioned too young, I came out of the crucible, hammered into steel, and wonder at these sorts of stories. Then again, I can see relatives in it. That said, I really like the writing. This was my first McMurtry novel and I think I should have started somewhere else. Perhaps, I'll try Lonesome Dove or Terms of Endearment because the style is good, but I just was not fond of the content. I think I had different expectations from the title.