Loop Group

Written by Larry McMurtry

Narrated by C. J. Critt

Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times best-selling author Larry McMurtry is one of America's best novelists. Several of his books are modern classics, including Lonesome Dove and Terms of Endearment, which was adapted into an Academy Award-winning motion picture. Now McMurtry delivers a funny yet sobering road trip novel reminiscent of Thelma and Louise and featuring two of the most original women to appear in fiction for quite some time. Maggie runs a group that dubs voices for movies. She spends much of her time fending off her three pushy daughters, and gets her kicks with her far older Sicilian lover. Connie, on the other hand, has a taste for younger men. These two best friends are getting past their prime, which is why they plan to have one last great adventure. But on the road from Texas to California and back, the women get caught up in events beyond their control. Packing a .38 Special, they blaze their trail across the Southwest, bumping into one zany character after another.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 6, 2008
• ISBN: 9781440799709

Larry McMurtry

Larry McMurtry (1936–2021) was the author of twenty-nine novels, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lonesome Dove, three memoirs, two collections of essays, and more than thirty screenplays. He lived in Archer City, Texas.

Reviews for Loop Group

[L A DeBord · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'm aborting the audio version to go read the actual book, despite the ultimate lack of productivity of having to do so. I simply cannot listen to another single word. The narrator over-editorializes so much I'm pretty sure her friends should stage an intervention for her (cocaine? coffee? St. John's wort? I don't know, but please, please back off whatever is making this reading so obnoxiously irritating). This book is intended to be a satire, I believe, but right now I hate all aspects of it, so it will go to the bottom of the McMurtry stack. I just wanted to spend a pleasant, rainy afternoon with some McMurtry characters so I could feel like I was back home without having to get on a plane or start smoking again. I did not want to have my eardrums ravaged by a narrator re-writing the story via her own interpretation of it. According to other reviewers, this narrator is usually enjoyable, so I will not write her off on this one performance. This is exactly why films have directors and audio books should (and sometimes do) as well. This is as unpleasant as Rita Hayworth shouting all the way through Miss Sadie Thompson (the director was too busy trying to manage a complicated 3D production for that 1953 film to pay attention to the performances or poorly adapted script). Will update after reading the book.

[samsattler · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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

[nickn54 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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.