Like most "antique" collections, Larry McMurtry's eighth novel [Cadillac Jack] is actually two or three valuables and a whole lot of junk. This is especially disappointing because McMurtry is too good a novelist … to believe that dozens of one-dimensional albeit eccentric characters, a protagonist who exists only to concatenate these eccentrics, and a theme and plot that remain forever incipient constitute literary art.

Cadillac Jack McGriff, antique scout extraordinaire, has a recurring dream of driving backward down the highway of his life. This surreal element permeates the novel like a crazed Pac-man munching away at everything resembling sustained characterization and meaningful plot. Although he seems dedicatedly ignorant of most things, McGriff does know "the power of things." Just name your "thing," and this modern day picaresque prostitute will find it, buy it and sell it to you faster than a maniac auctioneer's spiel.

Jack McGriff, however, is no itinerant flit frolicking about America emitting high-pitched squeals of delight over each newly discovered antique treasure. He's obviously meant by McMurtry to be all man, viz., a six-foot-five Texan, ex-world champion bulldogger, twice-divorced womanizer who spits out, John Wayne style, such philosophical aphorisms as "Truth can be counted on to arrive under its own power, where women are concerned."…

Reading Cadillac Jack is like walking through a labyrinth of side-shows or, much worse, like watching 30 or 40 television sitcoms and soaps in rapid succession. Having read the book, having escaped from the maze, having turned off the television, readers/viewers are bound to exclaim incredulously, "I pay $15.95, and that's it? No main attraction? No feature-length special? What a rip-off; this was supposed to be a novel by Larry McMurtry!" Several entertaining characters (really more flagrant caricatures than they are characters) do momentarily entertain and demand some attention, but ultimately readers will empathize with Jack when he laments midway through the novel that he seems to have "wandered into a garden of grotesques." (p. 179)

Somewhere beneath this novel's nonsense and scattered among its outlandish flotsam and jetsam lies a legitimate story about understanding America's spiritual and aesthetic values by examining what we keep as treasures and discard as trash. McMurtry himself may have sensed this, but the story remains hidden, and Cadillac Jack is, finally, as they say in Texas, all hat and no cattle. (p. 180)