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 striking nothing but air. The Carpenters don't have any real problems, they have pretend problems. The unreal nature of their problems—and their very real anguish in dealing with them—is, of course, part of McMurtry's point. It is a point that is sufficiently blunted by 794 pages of repetition to make one wish that his characters were poor or crazy or something so that we could at least get some action. Patsy's love affair—which takes up the middle third of the book—has simply got to be one of the dullest on record, and it is not helped by McMurtry's tendency to use three paragraphs of description where one would do as well. His obsession with the banalities of everyday experience is maddening….

The book has some solid qualities. At his best, McMurtry writes with intellect, compassion, and considerable skill. Patsy Carpenter is real, even if her problems aren't, and no matter how tired I got of her … I never stopped believing in her or caring about what was going to happen to her. The book is filled with memorable cameos—a rodeo clown, an elderly rancher, a cowboy who drives the zoo train in the off-season, graduate students—and McMurtry has a superior sense of place and time and the way the land sits. Yet the prose is full of white space and the plot is full of missed opportunities. One can scarcely comprehend Jim Carpenter at all, except in the simplest of terms, despite all the effort that is lavished on him.