In small-town Texas, walking just isn't an option: everybody knows that. You drive everywhere in your pickup. So when 62-year-old Duane Moore - successful oilman, husband and father, beloved grandfather to an untidy bunch of out-of-wedlock urchins - simply strolls away from his home, his family and his pickup one squally February day, and goes off to live in a cabin in the hills, everybody assumes he has lost his reason. With his host of vivid bit players, some tragic, some hilarious, some merely irritating, Larry McMurtry has the storytelling savvy of a Dickens or a Balzac; he finds poetry in the most prosaic of everyday occurrences and he has a sense of humour to die for (check out the chapters where the reluctant Duane embarks on a reading of Proust at the behest of his psychiatrist). If you have walked this earth for 40 years or more, you need to read this book.
