ALL MY FRIENDS ARE GOING TO BE STRANGERS

Danny Deck is not through school yet down there in Texas when he writes his first novel and sells it to Random House and the movies which might just remind you of the kind of easy-come success Larry McMurtry had with the books which became Hud and The Last Picture Show. It's just living that comes harder — marrying Sally who offers him lots of sex without love and then acts as if he didn't exist altogether; and then meeting Jill out on the coast who reverses the process; and in between he's alone in a rundown hotel writing and eating Fritos and Fig Newtons with an occasional exposure to the lusher life of the studios; finally he goes back to Texas, An Author, only to realize that all his friends are. . . . The novel's like Danny, footloose and available, with a wide-open romanticism which takes down the horny enterprise you have every reason to expect. And with the likable honesty of its youthful writer — "I could be better than average. I could probably even be minor." Susceptibly minor.