[All My Friends] focuses almost exclusively on sex for the first few chapters, then dwindles for a long stretch into life and literature, as if even McMurtry had grown fatigued by coition, but finally returns determinedly but tragically to the sexual theme when the hero Danny Deck, having discovered that the girl with "the clearest eyes, the straightest look, the most honest face" of all the girls won't—or maybe the word is can't—have him decides to commit suicide….
If All My Friends is made into a movie, perhaps again a shift in the story's focus will occur, which would be for the best. The story has many good characters; McMurtry comments wittily on the contemporary writing scene; and he displays a masterly ease in handling narrative and dialogue. But he has been told by his muse or his bank of the positive virtues of sexual activism, so that much that he says about the meagerness of Texas small-town life—or, in the middle of the novel, about the meagerness of the artisty life in California—is undercut by his obsession. (p. 28)
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