Mike Shea on the month’s new releases
Larry McMurtry
Loop Group
Simon & Schuster
Maggie Clary misses her womb. After 58 whole-bodied and even-keeled years living in the Hollywood bungalow where she was raised, a hysterectomy has dumped her into a state of quiet despair. None of life’s usual pleasures—shopping with her best girlfriend, Connie, Bloody Marys at Musso & Franks, or looping work with her film redubbing group, Prime Loops—set Maggie on fire anymore (though a quick tumble with her therapist, a cliché in the making, comes close to reviving her spark). The sitcom-style search (family, friends, and co-workers pitch in) for a solution to Maggie’s depression lies at the heart of LOOP GROUP(Simon & Schuster), a California slapstick romp from LARRY MCMURTRY. The author, newly freed from a two-year stint churning out westerns, with the Berrybender Narratives, is a nearly Olympian presence here, pushing his characters this way and that and eventually to his native Texas. When Maggie decides to clear the emotional cobwebs with a road trip to see family in Electric City, Connie has no choice but to join in; the pair hit the highway with maxed-out credit cards, a loaded .38 Special, and only a glimmer of an idea where they’re headed. Predictably unpredictable adventures ensue, including one with Maggie’s oddball Aunt Cooney, who runs a chicken gulag with more than two million birds from her 32-room Texas mansion. And then, suddenly, McMurtry brings the two back to Hollywood for a too-convenient wrap-up. It’s a quirky and amusing novel, but Zeus himself couldn’t transform Loop Group into the tragicomic odyssey it aspires to be.
J. Dee Hill & Phil Hollenbeck
Freaks & Fire: The Underground Reinvention Of Circus
Soft Skull Press
(Read an excerpt)
Buy this at BookPeople.com
What’s in a name? Irony, humor, and nostalgia for the seedy traveling shows of old in the cases of Circus Contraption, Zamora the Torture King, and the Yard Dogs Road Show—just three of the ten or so alternative circuses masterfully profiled in FREAKS & FIRE: THE UNDERGROUND REINVENTION OF CIRCUS (Soft Skull), by Dallasites J. DEE HILL and PHIL HOLLENBECK. This new breed of American barnstormers is inspired by the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow’s successful outing on the first Lollapalooza tour, and like the Rose show, the performers are by turns charming, scary, funny, sexual, and scatological. Hill’s text and Hollenbeck’s photos perfectly capture the raucous wit and energy that enable these postmodern circus tramps to transcend their low-budget roots.
