In and out of McMurtry’s comfort zone

IN his funky 2000 celebration of the American highway, “Roads,” Larry McMurtry, the consummate Texan, writes of Los Angeles with the affectionate exasperation of a native. “The freeways of Los Angeles have been my Ganges; for forty years I have been making my way up and down them, stalled as often as the Newbys were on the holy river.” As the writer of numerous screenplays, he has done his time in and around Hollywood, notably garnering an Oscar nomination for the adaptation (with Peter Bogdanovich) of his novel “The Last Picture Show.”

In his new novel, “Loop Group,” he returns to L.A. as a fictional setting for the first time since his 1978 novel, “Somebody’s Darling.” His subject here is the underbelly of the movie business, the bottom feeders getting by on bit work and memories. His heroine, Maggie, a 60-year-old widow and former studio script supervisor, has undergone a hysterectomy. The loss of her uterus throws her into such a tailspin that her three married daughters descend upon her bungalow on Las Palmas to conduct an “intervention.”

When Maggie wanders into Musso’s in search of a sardine sandwich, she is looking so disconsolate that one of the old retainers there suggests she take a trip. This flip remark makes her realize that she’s never been the traveling type. Except for a couple of trips to Lake Tahoe, one to Oklahoma City for a wedding and a quick trip south of Mexicali with an old boyfriend, she’s never made it past Disneyland. She decides to head east to see the Mississippi River. Geography not being her strong suit, she sets out to see the big river -- in Texas.

But before leaving, Maggie needs to book work for her loop group -- half a dozen misfits who make their living, when they’re not in jail or in rehab, providing background chatter for films. And she needs to run this idea by her kinky 80-something Sicilian therapist, Dr. Tom, who, after each session, takes her out to dinner in some old plush restaurant that nobody goes to anymore. In a moment of misguided passion, Maggie initiates some very heavy petting in her doctor’s office, only to wind up in his penthouse in the Chateau Marmont for what turns out to be a little more than she had bargained for.

She also decides that she needs a companion on her travels, and she recruits her best friend and fellow loop groupie, Connie -- a hard-drinking, shoot-from-the-hip type whose life of booze and shiftless men could easily be a country song. The two women head east in the loop group van with a .38 Special in the glove compartment and a supply of marijuana obtained from an amiable pusher on Hollywood Boulevard, en route to Electric City, Texas, to visit Maggie’s Aunt Cooney, an octogenarian chicken farmer with a surplus of sass.

They have adventures; they squabble; they get loaded on vodka, and talk a lot about sex. It’s a middle-aged road movie: “Thelma & Louise: The Menopause Years.” They may be down a quart when it comes to self-esteem and estrogen, but Maggie and Connie are a couple of feisty women with a zest for life who are looking for a little more excitement in their declining years.

McMurtry is better in the rural west than he is in Hollywood. The jaunt across Arizona, New Mexico and West Texas to Aunt Cooney’s 2-million-chicken “gulag” is the more entertaining part of the book. This is McMurtry territory: the modern western world of “Texasville” and “Duane’s Depressed.”

The author’s Hollywood, unfortunately, is off-key and retro. His marvelous ear for Texas dialogue does not travel well. The city and movie world he writes about is stuck in the 1970s, an era when there were still studio commissaries with upholstered banquette seats, where westerns were produced and Bullocks was a major department store. Some of the dialogue will hurt the ears of anyone living in Los Angeles. Have you ever heard someone refer to Las Palmas Street or “West Pico”? Have you ever tried heading east on Cahuenga Boulevard in Hollywood without a tank?

But they don’t hand out Pulitzers to just anybody, and McMurtry came by his honestly (for “Lonesome Dove”). Even when he doesn’t have his best stuff, the sheer richness of his palette winds up winning you over. This book, his 36th and counting (and his second this year), contains enough of his trademark quirky humor and sharp character delineation to make the occasionally bumpy ride worth taking.

Peter Lefcourt’s new novel, “The Manhattan Beach Project,” will be published in February.