Recommendations
Books Like Some Can Whistle by Larry McMurtry
For readers of the great Texas hermit-writer novel
If you loved Some Can Whistle — Danny Deck on his Texas ranch, rich and isolated, the phone call from the daughter he has never met, the collision between his philosophical framework and T.R.'s practical vitality — these novels share the same territory: writers who have stopped writing, fathers who have failed their children, and the specific comedy of intellectual men confronting people who don't care about their theories.
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Buy on AmazonAll My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers
by Larry McMurtry
The essential companion novel — Danny Deck as a young Houston writer, his first novel's success, his inability to write a second; Some Can Whistle is richer for knowing the earlier novel, which establishes who Danny was before he became the hermit we meet.
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Buy on AmazonLonesome Dove
by Larry McMurtry
McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece — the companion in his full range; the frontier Texas epic is the opposite pole from Some Can Whistle's introspective mode, showing the breadth of what Texas means to McMurtry.
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Buy on AmazonThe World According to Garp
by John Irving
Irving's comic novel about a writer trying to be both an artist and a father — the companion in the tradition of the American novel about writing's relationship to life; Garp's attempts to balance fatherhood and writing are the more chaotic, comic version of what Danny Deck faces.
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Buy on AmazonHumboldt's Gift
by Saul Bellow
Bellow's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — Charlie Citrine's meditation on his dead mentor and on what literary success actually delivers; the companion in the high-literary tradition of the American novelist thinking about fame, failure, and the relationship between art and money.
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Buy on AmazonThe Sportswriter
by Richard Ford
Ford's novel about a former novelist turned sportswriter in the aftermath of grief — Frank Bascombe is the nearest contemporary literary character to Danny Deck; both are men who were supposed to write great novels and found themselves unable to, managing the resulting emptiness in different ways.
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Buy on AmazonA Fan's Notes
by Frederick Exley
Exley's autobiographical novel about failure and the man who was supposed to succeed — the companion in the tradition of American fiction about men who can't do what they're supposed to do; Danny's success where Exley's narrator fails is the mirror image of the same problem.
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Buy on AmazonTerms of Endearment
by Larry McMurtry
McMurtry's companion in his domestic fiction — Aurora Greenway's impossible personality is the female version of the formidable, isolated character whose world suddenly changes; both novels are about the comedy of a certain kind of person being confronted by the unexpected.
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Buy on AmazonDinner at the Homesick Restaurant
by Anne Tyler
Tyler's novel about a family trying to have one dinner together — the companion in American fiction about the parent-child relationship's complexity across decades; the Tull family's impossible dinners are the domestic, Baltimore version of Danny and T.R.'s impossible reunion.
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