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All book ratings have a subjective element to them, but this one is more subjective than most. It’s not so much that I think this is really a five star book, but it is a five star book for me. Although I’ve read it at least twice before, those readings have predated my time on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ: the first was, memorably, April in 1991 when I found my copy (now battered, and just barely holding together) at Half Price Books in Rice University Village on my reconnoiter trip to be an English literature student in the graduate school there. It was a lucky find, and even though it was set during the late 1960s - around the time of my birth, and 25 years previous to my own arrival in Houston - it seemed like a sign.

Described by one of its early readers as McMurtry’s “love letter to Rice graduate school,� (Larry McMurtry, Tracy Daugherty), it somehow managed to be romantic and nostalgic and bittersweet and I ate it up. Although the details of the plot might get foggy - after all, this is a 800 page whopper of a book which covers not just the English department at Rice, but marriage, parenthood, a Panhandle ranch, the rodeo circuit, Hollywood, and the counterculture scene of San Francisco, all amidst the turbulent backdrop of the 1960s - I never forget the protagonist Patsy Carpenter and all of her confusions and enthusiasms. I never forget the fact that she loves Tristram Shandy, a notoriously difficult 18th century novel that I also read while at Rice, and I never forget the first paragraph of the novel.

Patsy sat by herself at the beginning of the evening, eating a melted Hershey bar. She had been reading Catch-22 but remembered the Hershey and fished it out of the glove compartment, where it had been all day. It was too melted to be neatly handleable, so she laid the paperback on the car seat and avidly swiped the chocolate off the candy paper with two fingers. When the candy was gone, she dropped the sticky wrappers out the window and licked what was left of the chocolate off her fingers before picking up the book again.

Sometimes she ate casually and read avidly - other times she read casually and ate avidly.

There is a lot of detail in the this book and it doesn’t always or even often serve the plot. It offers what McMurtry himself described as “texture,� and either you are a reader who enjoys the texture of what was eaten, what was read, what was worn, what was listened to, how it all smelled, or you don’t. I do - and the lavish details of what Patsy is eating and reading particularly appeal to me. They make for what I think of a “cozy� atmosphere and they really anchor the setting of the book to a time and place. Perhaps I feel this all more keenly as a displaced Texan who once moved to Houston as an impressionable young woman and fell in love - not once, but twice - and then moved away, but forever remained nostalgic for that young, ripe time. I lived in the same neighbourhood as Patsy and her husband Jim and their best friends Emma and Flap Horton and every street name has resonance for me. The very fact that this time of life couldn’t last, and didn’t, adds to its poignance.

In a Preface to my edition of the novel, Larry McMurtry addresses the controversial fact that his heroine Patsy cries a lot. It’s true that she does cry a lot; her crying is an unignorable constant of the book, and it is sometimes annoying, but it doesn’t make me dislike the character or the book. McMurtry claims that the women in his life, at the time, were always crying and there is no reason to doubt him. I’ve known a few “copiously tearful young women� myself, and one of them is my daughter. Confusion, pain, frustration, anger, an excess of emotion in general - these emotions often find their outlet in tears, especially in young women.

Confusion and frustration are the emotional keynotes of Patsy’s life, although she is - and knows herself to be - fortunate and privileged in many ways. Patsy is an exceptionally bright young woman who often puts her husband Jim and the other male graduate students in the shade with her sharp memory and quick wits, but nothing much is expected of her other than being a young wife and mother and looking highly decorative. At the beginning of the novel she is trailing after her husband and whatever is his latest hobby; by the end, she is in charge of a household which includes her son Davey and her pregnant sister Miri and one feels that she beginning to discover what she might become.

I could write more about the political and social commentary that is in this book - the casual sexism and racism that was inescapable at the time - and perhaps I noticed it all more on this latest reading, but that is not what McMurtry puts in the foreground and that’s not what endures, for me, about the novel. It will forever be a sentimental favourite of mine.