The new comic novel Larry McMurtry hails as: “a delight, lively, freewheeling, surprising, vivid. And funny.”

When Rowdy Talbot loses his silver belt buckle—the prize for winning the Crockett County bullriding championship—to two Frenchwomen he met in a bar, he hops on a plane to the City of Light to get it back, only to tangle with disaffected French revolutionaries, a turquoise-peddling CIA operative, a middle-aged courtesan, and a plot to destroy an American fast-food franchise. As Rowdy discovers in the chaos, there’s a whole other world beyond the back of a bull.

So how funny is Rowdy in Paris?