The principal trouble with Larry McMurtry's [Moving On] … is that it is about 500 pages too long. His characters are too amiable and ordinary, his action is too slight, his psychology is too shallow, and his incidents are just too damn normal to justify the incredibly extended treatment he has given them. There is simply not enough material here to cover the ground, and the result is a book that is fidgety, diffuse, and keenly disappointing.

From a summer in the rodeo circuit to a year in graduate school in Houston, the book follows the lives and declining personal fortunes of an attractive but bland pair of wealthy young Texans named Jim and Patsy Carpenter. McMurtry is dealing with some important themes, among them the decline of the old pioneering virtues and the role of women in a basically masculine society, but more often than not he ends up...