[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)

Yet McMurtry does catch some of the quality of that life, those lives, despite his obsession, and if he were Sinclair Lewis or Hamlin Garland rather than Texas's Henry Miller a reader would come away astonished by what his poor beaten-down characters have been driven to in their various crummy refuges from the American dream. They never speak or think beyond their immediate experience. They seem never to have heard of governments, war, values, progress, god. With the exception of a drunken English sociologist who likes to talk big and literary (and thereby to discredit the big and literary), the range is from orgasms to Uncle L's goats. The talk about goats is comic, and so are Uncle L's manhole covers and camels (it seems that he collects these), but even such diversions, which indicate that McMurtry clearly felt the need for diversion, don't get us out of the small-talk small-scene small-soul rut that Texas seems to have dug for its people. They are just there in the dust, the wind, the tenements and the car back seats, living their unilluminated existential privacies. (pp. 28-9)

Of course it may be I who am in the minority in imagining that many American lives do contain, or should or could contain, more than McMurtry finds in his land of oil derricks, pool halls and Mexican whore houses. Maybe what he has found there is in fact our country's still center…. But McMurtry's commitments are not that clear; in the first place he does not come at sex, as did Lawrence, as a holiness, but is instead matter-of-factly physical about it; and in the second place his social consciousness—or whatever that larger awareness is that I have tried to describe that makes for what some still think to be civilization—is unquestionably present and at work in him. He is not a primitive by inclination or god's order; he is only driven into mimicking a primitivist ethic by the current demand that a novel be sex and by the apparently very real absence of alternative pleasures and pastimes in his homeland (and in the Californian writer-culture that succeeded it for him). In other words there seems to be a sort of negative rationale at work in the man at the moment making him the novelist he is. And he is so good at being the novelist he is that it may be ungrateful of me to wish he would discover some new country; but I do. (p. 29)