Loop Group is Larry McMurtry at his contemporary best, a novel that can best be described as Thelma and Louise meets Terms of Endearment, in which two aging ladies set out on a road trip that will take them from Hollywood to Texas, with many adventures on the way.

As Loop Group opens, we meet Maggie, whose three grown-up daughters have arrived at her Hollywood home to try and make her see sense about her busy life, a life that intersects with lots of interesting—all right, bizarre—people. Her daughters push her into having a few second thoughts about it, and these are reinforced when her best friend, Connie, seeks an escape from her own world of complex and difficult relationships with men. Maggie conceives the idea of driving to visit her Aunt Cooney’s ranch near Electric City, Texas, and the two women prepare for the trip by buying a .38 Special revolver (which leads to unexpected trouble along the way). This road trip will end by changing their lives

A fan of Larry's work, this was OK but not at the level of Lonesome Dove, Texasville or others he's written. I'm a big fan of his offbeat sense of humor though there's only smatterings of it in Loop Group. Regardless it's a 'beach blanket read' and something worth putting on the 'to read for later' list. ( )

Larry McMurtry has always had the knack of creating memorably quirky characters for his novels and Loop Group is no exception. He seems to have a particular fondness for feisty sixty-something year old women, and with Maggie Clary and her best friend Connie, he has created two of the funniest fictional women since Terms of Endearment’s Aurora Greenway. Maggie and Connie, best friends since the sixth grade, are two women who simply refuse to act like the sixty-year olds they are. Single and lusty as ever, they are still using their Hollywood contacts to hustle a living as part of a “loop group” that provides groans, shrieks, grunts and other sounds as part of the dubbing process used for movie soundtracks.

Critics have pointed out that the movie world no longer functions as McMurtry portrays it in Loop Group, if it ever did. But that’s really not the point. This is comedy, almost slapstick at times, and the workaday details of Hollywood movie production are just not an important a part of the story. Readers looking for a realistic portrayal of Hollywood, or for answers about the meaning of life for those who reach sixty years of age, will be disappointed. This is a comedy, not a self-help book, and it is a first-rate comedy, at that. I was surprised at the number of extremely bad reviews the book has received on Amazon.com because this is vintage McMurtry with a style and tone that is not unlike many of his best books of the past. Loop Group is being panned for many of the same reasons that other McMurtry books have been praised.

Maggie has literally not felt whole since her hysterectomy and her three daughters and her friends are worried enough about her that she has begun to receive their special attention. Depressed and listless, and growing more depressed all the time because of all the extra attention she is getting, Maggie decides to take the advice of a flirtatious waiter to get away from it all and see a bit of America. She and Connie, two women who have never strayed far from Los Angeles in their entire lives, head for Texas to visit Maggie’s only living aunt, a vigorous six-gun toting woman who is the proud owner of “two million chickens” and a house that reminds the ladies of the one in the movie Giant.

Maggie and Connie are no Thelma and Louise and on their way to Texas they manage to meet a “professional” hitchhiker who scares them so badly that they leave the interstate and travel some of the most desolate back roads that the Southwest has to offer. They even manage to lose their van to a chronic car thief when they stop in the middle of nowhere at the first sign of civilization that they’ve seen for hours.

Typical of a Larry McMurtry book, Maggie and Connie share their lives and their little adventures with side characters eccentric enough to make them seem almost normal. There are Maggie’s little Sicilian shrink, the various members of her “loop group,” her three daughters and their husbands, and her Aunt Cooney, for a start. This one is fun. Especially so if the reader recognizes up front that it is farce and not intended as a guide book to aging gracefully, a point that many critics seem to have missed.

Rated at: 4.0 ( )

This book is better than McMurtry's other recent novels. I tend to prefer his modern/contemporary novels rather than those set in the 19th century "old west."

Loop Group may have limited appeal since it's main characters are older. However, it is set in Hollywood and draws on McMurtry's connections with film making.

His prose, as always, is easy to read, and enjoyable. ( )

I've just finished my first book of the year, Loop Group by Larry McMurtry. Ordinarily I am a huge fan of McMurtry's writing but this book just left me cold. It was disjointed and reads like he wrote it in a hurry just to get the darn thing published. It has a good premise.....a 60 year old, life-long Hollywood resident and her relationships with her daughters, best friend and various other people in her life. Unfortunately McMurtry doesn't explore any of the relationships in depth. Instead, he jumps around from one improbable scenario to another at the speed of light. There is no time for the reader to get to know the characters, no time for empathy (or any other emotion for that matter) to develop. All in all, I give this book 1 star at best and certainly wouldn't recommend it to McMurtry fans. ( )