Moving On

By Martha Duffy

ALL MY FRIENDS ARE GOING TO BE STRANGERS

by LARRY McMURTRY 286 pages. Simon & Schuster. $7.50.

Texan Larry McMurtry is much better known for the movies made from his fiction than for the books themselves. His first novel. Horseman, Pass By, became Hud; his third was The Last Picture Show.

That kind of dislocation usually happens in the careers of slicker authors who latch on to popular problems or write characters that turn out to be "parts." But McMurtry is not slick. He tends, in fact, to create indelible people and brilliant set-piece scenes. Nor can it be said that success has deflected him from his sometimes invisible course. Unhappily, his books are constructed like tumbleweed. Moving On, the last one, was 794 arbitrary pages long, with no discernible direction. All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers is less than half that length. It is acute, elegiac, funny and dangerously tender, and in tone --if not content--more like a memoir than a novel.

What story there is chronicles the 23rd year in the life of Danny Deck, a sometime graduate student at Rice University in Houston and a writer. Danny is just discovering "the abruptness with which major changes can occur in life." Within a few months, he has seen his first novel bought by Random House and Hollywood, fallen in love with two women and completed a wary tour of self-exile in California.

Danny comes from West Texas cattie-handling stock. He has never been any place he could not drive to, and he loves the road and his car. He is also hooked on trashy highway food: butter rum Life Savers, Peanut Planks, cheap cheeseburgers. A brief, miserable marriage does not alter his open approach to life, nor does he fall for the blandishments of publishers and movie pro ducers -- although they give McMurtry a chance to kid literary parties and Hollywood editing methods.

The book is really a series of leave-takings -- from Rice, student friends and Texas, later from his wife, and his mistress and California. Its best sequence concerns Danny's compulsive trip back to the remotest personal past he has.

He visits the ruined demesne of Uncle L, who is a mean and misanthropic 92 yoked to an equally mean woman who wants to inherit his land. Having no re gard for cattle, Uncle L has a herd of camels instead, along with spotted pigs, molting turkeys and a buffalo cow. Un cle L is a living figment -- as well as a caricature -- of the old, wild American dream. He still expects to encounter his hero, Emiliano Zapata, before he dies.

Every night he searches the range for him and keeps a bag of gold handy for the meeting.

The gigantic past and the constricted present are alternating currents in the novel, and McMurtry is ambivalent about both. In an essay, he once called himself the victim of "a contradiction of attractions. I am critical of the past, yet attracted to it; and though I am even more critical of the present, I am also quite clearly attracted to it." That kind of ambivalence can nourish a nov elist able to explore its consequences.

If, in addition, his natural subject is Texas, it can be as tough and sustaining as the jerky drying on Uncle L's clothesline. . Martha Duffy

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