Recommendations
Books Like Moving On by Larry McMurtry
For readers of the epic Houston domestic novel
If you loved Moving On — Patsy Carpenter's restless years in Houston academic life, the sense of an intelligent woman in an inadequate marriage trying to figure out what she wants, McMurtry's comprehensive portrait of a specific American social world — these novels share the same ambition: the full portrait of middle-class American life in a specific place and time, treated with novelistic patience.
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Buy on AmazonAll My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers
by Larry McMurtry
The second Houston trilogy novel — Danny Deck's first literary success and his inability to stay anywhere; shares some characters with Moving On and is the next installment in McMurtry's portrait of Houston intellectual life.
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Buy on AmazonTerms of Endearment
by Larry McMurtry
The third Houston trilogy novel — Aurora Greenway and Emma's relationship; the companion in McMurtry's Houston domestic fiction; the most focused and emotionally powerful of the Houston trilogy.
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Buy on AmazonThe Women's Room
by Marilyn French
French's feminist novel — the companion in American fiction about intelligent women trapped in inadequate marriages in the 1960s–70s; Mira's experience of Cambridge academic life is the feminist, politically explicit version of what Patsy Carpenter experiences in Houston.
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Buy on AmazonRevolutionary Road
by Richard Yates
Yates's great novel about a marriage that fails because the woman is more desperate for something real than the man — April Wheeler is the Connecticut, earlier version of Patsy Carpenter; the companion in American fiction about female aspiration in a world that doesn't know what to do with it.
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Buy on AmazonThe Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath
Plath's autobiographical novel about a young woman of intelligence confronting the 1950s–60s limits on female aspiration — Esther Greenwood is the literary, more extreme version of what Patsy experiences; the companion in American fiction about the gifted young woman who doesn't know how to use her gifts.
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Buy on AmazonLonesome Dove
by Larry McMurtry
McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece — the companion in his full range; where Moving On is the comprehensive portrait of Houston domestic life, Lonesome Dove is the epic frontier portrait; together they show the breadth of McMurtry's Texas world.
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Buy on AmazonBreathing Lessons
by Anne Tyler
Tyler's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — Maggie and Ira Moran's drive to a funeral and back; the companion in American fiction about a marriage in its middle age, the woman who is more alive than the man, and the specific texture of an ordinary American life examined closely.
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Buy on AmazonMiddlemarch
by George Eliot
Eliot's great English novel — the companion in the literary tradition of the comprehensive portrait of a provincial world; Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch is the 19th-century English version of what Patsy Carpenter is in 1960s Houston; McMurtry was consciously working in the Tolstoyan tradition that Middlemarch exemplifies.
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