Larry McMurtry's Review of Clinton's "My Life" in the NY Times

[joeybee12]

Notice how an ACTUAL WRITER likes the book!!?? Larry sums it up in the second paragraph (see snip below) about why the book is getting trashed. One word--snobbery. Politicians and journalists are smug, tiny-minded elitists who can't get over the fact that Clinton actually LIVED the American dream.


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/23/books/review/0623books-mcmurtry-clinton.html?8dpc


William Jefferson Clinton's "My Life" is, by a generous measure, the richest American presidential autobiography - no other book tells us as vividly or fully what it is like to be president of the United States for eight years. Clinton had the good sense to couple great smarts with a solid education; he arrived in Washington in 1964 and has been the nation's - or perhaps the world's - No. 1 politics junkie ever since. And he can write - as Reagan, Ford, Nixon and Lyndon B. Johnson, to go no farther back, could not.

In recent days the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant have been raised as a stick to beat Clinton with, and why? Snobbery is why. Some people don't want slick Bill Clinton to have written a book that might be as good as dear, dying General Grant's. In their anxiety lest this somehow happen they have not accurately considered either book.

Grant's is about being a general, in what Lincoln called a big war. Clinton's is about being a president at the end of the 20th century. Grant's is an Iliad, with the gracious Robert E. Lee as Hector and Grant himself the murderous Achilles. Clinton's is a galloping, reckless, political picaresque, a sort of pilgrim's progress, lowercase. There are plenty of stout sticks to beat Clinton with, but Grant's memoirs is not one of them.

Bill Clinton spent most of his childhood in the small town of Hope, Ark., which, culturally, is on the western edge of the South or the eastern edge of the Midwest, depending on which way one happened to be looking. His garrulity, which in the book manifests itself as too unremitting a focus on the minutiae of governance, maybe comes from the South, while his loneliness, his slight out-of-placeness, his seeming inability to get himself to really solid ground, comes from the Midwest, where he would have grown up had his father not rolled a car off the road and drowned in a drainage ditch. He died three months before Bill was born.

[Philostopher]

1. McMurtry would like it ...

Clinton is a lot like some of Larry McMurtry's best characters! The flawed heroic type who makes sometimes inexplicable decisions about women and his sex life. Bill Clinton is very much like a McMurtry leading man.

[senseandsensibility]

2. I agree

I love McMurtry's fiction from his "Hollywood" period, Clinton is in that mold.;)

[Taverner]

12. I was just going to say that

Clinton could have hung out in Last Picture Show...

[underpants]

3. A very good review

I only read the first page but it seems to be quite the read. McMurtry knows a thing or two about writing.

[playahata1]

4. fine review by a fine writer.

The only McMurtry novel I have read is "Cadillac Jack." I would like to get into more of McMurtry's stuff. Any MUST READS? Thanks.

[Misinformed01]

6. Must read? Lonesome Dove

Hands down, one of the finest pieces of Historical Fiction produced in this century.

[Bridget Burke]

7. I'll second "Lonesome Dove"

In the running for Great American Novel. (At least, Great Western Novel.) I'd also recommend many of his pre-Lonesome Dove novels.

It's not strange that someone who once wore a t-shirt saying "Minor Regional Novelist" would understand the snobbishness directed against the brilliant man from Arkansas.

[Nevernose]

8. And, of course, the book that put him on the map

"The Last Picture Show" My mother keeps telling me to read "Some Can Whistle" Know if it's any good?

[nborders]

13. Lonesome Dove tops my book list

I have read it about 4 times. I didn't like any of the others.

~n

[ArkDem]

5. It does read like a novel.

[carolinayellowdog]

9. Clueless about geography

I like McMurtry but Hope is nowhere near the eastern edge of the Midwest, which is roughly the Ohio River.

[ArkDem]

10. More like northern louisiana

[Nevernose]

14. Huh. And I thought it was a suburb of Texas.

[Waverley_Hills_Hiker]

16. its near Texarkana, where old Ross Perot was from.

Clinton was a good old boy, for sure.

[Nevernose]

17. So am I

It was a joke, although to be perfectly honest, I'm usually the only one whos gets 'em. I keep making them, though...

[Waverley_Hills_Hiker]

15. yeah, I caught that too...

...maybe he means the eastern edge of the Great Plains? Or eastern edge of the West.

[Lisa]

11. that's great! When I read "Duane's Depressed" ...

... somehow I pictured the lead character looking a lot more like Clinton than Jeff Bridges (who played Duane in "Last Picture Show" and "Texasville").

And Timothy Bottoms (who played Sonny Crawford) does look quite a bit like George W. (whom he's portrayed several times).

[Waverley_Hills_Hiker]

18. I think McMurty picks up on that "folk culture" aspect of Clinton.

I think Clinton is wired in some wierd way into the American psyche, into American myths and legends of sin & redemption, into the folk character of the loveable rogue and flawed hero.

Clinton really connects, the way the two Bushes really dont.

[playahata1]

19. Thanks, Misinformed, Brdget, borders, et al

for the McMurtry info.