Paradise

May 21, 2001
Prolific Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, memoirist, screenplay writer and bookstore owner McMurtry (Lonesome Dove, etc.) took a 1999 cruise to "paradise"—Tahiti and the South Sea Islands—"in order to think and write about" his parents, Hazel and Jeff McMurtry. The couple "saw the sea only once" during their 43-year marriage in Archer County, Tex., about which their son writes, "Many people like Archer County, and a few people love it, but no one would be likely to think it an earthly paradise." The lush landscape of Tahiti and neighboring islands contrasts sharply with his parents' hardscrabble North Texas life. Listening "to the gentle slosh of the Pacific" in the lagoon beneath his raised bungalow, he recalls the day in 1954, as he packed to leave for college, when his mother startled him with the revelation that she had previously been married. Aboard the Aranui, he watches his shipmates ("world-class shoppers") while making occasional attempts to phone his dying mother back in Texas. He closely observes his surroundings (the Marquesas has "an end-of-the-world feel," while the Ua Pou flea market provides "a good illustration of the reach of global capitalism and its ability to turn the whole world into a species of mall"). As his odyssey ends, he wants "to turn right around and go back to Nuku Hiva." Readers of this excellent travelogue, abounding with literary references from Henry James to Kerouac, will likely return to the book often to reread their favorite passages of McMurtry's meditative prose. Map. Agent, Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency.

July 1, 2001
Pulitzer Prize winner McMurtry has written a gem of a book part family memoir and part travelog in this slim, autobiographical volume. The author of 24 novels, four nonfiction books, and more than 30 screenplays and editor of an anthology of modern Western fiction, McMurtry has recently become deeply introspective, as evidenced by his memoirs, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen (LJ 10/1/99) and Roads. (LJ 7/00) In these memoirs, McMurtry reflected on his own life and experiences, providing a sense of Texas as vast, unique, yet in an inevitable decline. In this new memoir, he tells a west Texas tale, but he writes it from the peace and tranquillity of the South Sea Islands. McMurtry boards a freighter to the Marquesas to begin his journey both physical and emotional and records his parents' lives, beginning with their marriage in 1934 during the depths of the Depression. He analyzes their lives prior to their union and contrasts them with the lushness, laziness, and sheer beauty of Tahiti and the South Sea Islands. This personal little book offers both a wonderful depiction of a place and a sincere picture of the author and his family. Highly recommended. Cynde Bloom Lahey, New Canaan Lib., CT

Copyright 2001 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2001
McMurtry is such a pro he could make laundry seem interesting. Now in his sixties, a veteran of heart surgery and the author of two dozen novels, he has been scrutinizing his own life in a spate of memoirs, including "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen" (1999) and" Roads" (2000). In this installment, a magnetic blend of irascibility and grace, he recounts the journey he made to Oceania while his mother lay dying in Texas. He begins in Tahiti, where he praises Gauguin for the painter's discernment of the shadow side of this sensually perfect yet melancholy place. From there he boards a freighter--along with a group of fellow travelers he dubs, not altogether unkindly, lotus eaters and island junkies--for the Marquesas, which, in their profound isolation and refreshing absence of hotels, define, for him, the very essence of "farness." He is surprised, therefore, to find that their communities remind him of Southwest Indian reservations and the "drying-up small towns on the Great Plains," perceptions that intensify his thoughts about his mother, his parents' long, unhappy marriage, and their complete lack of interest in the world beyond west Texas. This is the beauty of McMurtry's forthright chronicle: he's attuned to the silky sea but cued to the grit of home, cannily aware that he's put himself into a sort of limbo, floating from island to island cut off from family, friends, and the news, while his mother is also adrift, separating slowly from the body and the self, bound for a realm that, like the Marquesas, may or may not be paradise. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)