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By Root 650 0

rural or small-town upbringings as far behind them as possible. Not a few of the reviewers had come from places where there were cows, never wanted to see or hear of a cow again, and McMurtry’s novels were full of cows. Besides, the prevailing tone of American fiction at the time was urban, Jewish, and Eastern—the West was seen, in the eyes of the literati, as “a colossal mistake” (to quote Freud’s famous remark about America), a land given over to violence, deprived of culture, and essentially rednecked—a view that was not improved by the experience of having had Lyndon B. Johnson in the White House. McMurtry, Dorothea said, did not feel he had gotten a fair shake from the reviewers, nor did he think he was likely to. The fact that his books had been made into movies made the reviewers only that much less likely to take him seriously, of course—if there is one thing New York reviewers can’t stand it’s an author getting rich despite them. McMurtry’s feelings on the matter were strong enough that he often wore a sweatshirt bearing a dismissive phrase often used about him by East Coast reviewers: “Minor Regional Novelist.”

The reason why all this mattered was that McMurtry had just finished a huge novel (his earlier books had been quite slim), on quite a different scale from anything he had done before. It was called The Country of the Horn (cows again) and was the first (and perhaps still the only) big American novel with a rodeo background. McMurtry’s present publisher had showed no enthusiasm for the book, and he was looking for a new home with an editor who not only understood what he was doing but might even take on the New York critics.

As it happened, I have never had the slightest respect for critics or any degree of interest in their opinions, despite my own sideline as a film critic. In most areas of artistic endeavor, film and theater, for instance, the major reviewers have at least some conception of and respect for popular taste and do not simply ignore anything that might appeal to it. Any theater reviewer of The New York Times who limited himself or herself only to off-Broadway productions of avant-garde plays and utterly ignored or automatically condemned anything with popular appeal, such as a big musical, or who judged a big musical by the standards of avant-garde theater, would be fired. Book reviewers for the Times—and, alas, not only the Times—however, get away with completely ignoring the vast majority of books that people actually buy and read, and on the rare occasions when they do review such books, they judge them by the literary standards of the esoteric books that nobody reads except critics. That the New York reviewers had not paid sufficient attention to McMurtry did not surprise or dismay me.

When I told Dorothea Oppenheimer this, she was in ecstasy. I must read McMurtry’s new book immediately—she would get it over to me at once. I read it that night, and it was love at first sight. I found it difficult to conceive that any reader, even a Times reviewer, could dislike the heroine, Patsy Carpenter, around whose marriage to a young graduate student the whole book revolves. As for rodeo, here it was. If the American public wanted the Moby-Dick of rodeo, McMurtry had provided it. I called Dorothea the next morning and said I had to meet McMurtry.

She had been about to suggest that herself. McMurtry had developed something of a suspicion toward Eastern editors as well as Eastern book critics—toward anyone, in fact, who might think of him as a minor regional novelist—and a meeting might not be a bad idea, just to dispel any fears he might have that I was in this category. Would I fly down to Houston to see him?

I was eager to go. I called Snyder and explained what I was doing, which was fine with him. He liked action and would have been happy to have the entire editorial staff flying around the country in search of books. It was the sight of them sitting in their offices that provoked him.

I had arranged to meet McMurtry in the lobby of a downtown hotel, and it was only once I was there that