An Author Recaptures His Voice
BENEDEK, EMILY
An Author Recaptures His Voice The Desert Rose By Larry McMurtry Simon & Schuster. 256pp. $14.95. Reviewed by Emily Benedek For years, Larry McMurtry has steered clear of the world of his early...
...Generally when a guy left her love would be going at full speed...
...the characters face broad moral choices that stem from an effort to reconcile their larger yearnings with their ties to the soil...
...McMurtry uses the contrapuntal pattern effectively to emphasize the curious routes of human sympathy and the quality of bonds in the lives of the dislocated...
...Because films were made out of Horseman (retitled Hud) and The Last Picture Show, they are the author's most famous works...
...Harmony and Pepper share a duplex with Myrtle, "a tiny redhead in her early sixties who had no intention of letting age or anything else get in the way of pleasure...
...Rather, she has the mixed blessing of living in good faith in a world that hardly reciprocates...
...He has, in fact, harshly criticized himself and other writers from his home state for what he sees as a desire to cling to the "country-and-western" genre while ignoring the realities of the contemporary urban Southwest...
...Reviewed by Emily Benedek For years, Larry McMurtry has steered clear of the world of his early and most successful books-the Texas that was...
...It looked so miniature, like a wonderful toy place, with all the lights "still on, whereas on her other side there was a bright band of sun behind the mountains, from horizon to horizon...
...Despite her 20 years of hard work in the famous Stardust Hotel floor show, and the once-prevailing opinion that she had "the best legs in Las Vegas and maybe the best bust too," she has been told by manager Jackie Bonventre that she must leave on her 40th birthday...
...The power of the land is recognized in The Desert Rose, too, forMcMurtry makes it clear that those who ignore it are condemned to atrophy in the neon city...
...The Desert Rose charts the last weeks in the career of a 39-year-old showgirl named Harmony...
...The couple had gotten along, Harmony explains, yet Ross' 'liked to change lives once in a while and he was such a good light man he could always get work...
...The characters pass in and out of urban Texas, graduate school, money, and relationships...
...McMurtry is skillful enough to demonstrate her generosity and compassion without making her a caricature, a fool, or even a victim...
...Texas, old and new, remains a fertile literary landscape, as the work of such writers as Larry L. King, Beth Henley and Thomas McGuane attests...
...Harmony still has pretty much her pick of the men in town...
...McMurtry's men tend to pale beside his women, and in this book, instead of deriving strength from their partners, they drift away...
...LikeGodwin Lloyd-Johns, the British sociologist and professed Flaubert-ian who pops up in two of McMurtry's earlier books, Mel appears on the provincial landscape to challenge the inhabitants' limited worldview...
...Since he finally seems capable of writing about the modern West without being derailed by ghosts or stylistic artifice, though, one hopes he will soon take us back to his native habitat...
...and Las Vegas, respectively...
...Yet until now his attempts to break away have been flawed by a ponderous determination to write "literature" and by a rambling search for focus...
...Harmony hears about the betrothal from friends...
...Pepper, who has just become engaged, is aloof and rebellious...
...But the direction of their wanderings, beyond a vague compulsion to wrestle with the Lone Star State's mythical past, is unclear...
...Harmony has peacocks...
...However distressing the situation, she finds a way to make a big breakfast (one of McMurtry's favorite signs of affection), run an errand, flash a smile, squeeze a hand...
...The novel is carefully constructed, its six parts focusing alternately on Harmony and Pepper...
...She is weak enough to love and strong enough not to wound her loved ones...
...Their short excursions-to Mexico to look for whores, to sports events on the school bus, Saturday nights in the pickup-provide a backdrop for their most intense emotions and for decisions that seemed impossible within walking distance of home...
...she was like a beautiful car, a Mercedes or something, that had everything it needed except brakes...
...With Somebody's Darling, Cadillac Jack and now The Desert Rose, McMurtry abandons Texas altogether for the more ephemeral locales of Hollywood, Washington, D.C...
...Many of the writer's trademarks are present: humor, a laconic ingenuousness, resilient, good-natured characters...
...The future is determined by luck...
...and Jessie, another veteran showgirl nearing mandatory retirement, a toy poodle...
...His once impeccable sense of pacing, though, has deserted him...
...The last seems to be exactly what he has been looking for, a city dominated by transients...
...As a substitute for owning land, many residents of McMurtry's glitter palace keep animals that reflect their personalities...
...McMurtry takes another step in what currently constitutes the middle third of his oeuvre, Moving On, A11 My Friends are Going to Be Strangers and Terms of Endearment...
...Harmony is reminiscent of McMurtry's early female characters, winning us by giving without hesitation...
...Moreover, to the few denizens of Las Vegas who are moved to explore beyond their immediate surroundings the desert expanses offer a chance for transcendence: "When she turned off the pavement onto the bumpy dirt road Harmony looked back at the Strip, eight miles away...
...Myrtle her goats...
...Her most recent boyfriend, Denny, ran out on her after precipitating the cancellation of her Visa card, destroying her car, and stealing a $1,300 insurance check from the mailbox...
...Even a nice morning was a form of happiness, plus having a sweet guy around for a while was another form, a major form actually, major even if usually sort of brief in her experience...
...Here most of the action involves leavetaking...
...She eats only Cheerios, unless someone takes her out to Wendy's for a burger binge...
...It is easy to understand why McMurtry felt the need to search for material elsewhere...
...In McMurtry's first three novels?Horseman, Pass By, Leaving Cheyenne, and The Last Picture Show-the texture of life is deeply rooted in a sense of place...
...Their stories run in opposite directions, with Harmony's luck falling as her daughter's rises...
...Ross, Harmony's husband, left her soon after Pepper's birth...
...But the choice is between one second-rate card shark and another...
...In The Last Picture Show McMurtry opens the vista a bit, introducing the possibility of escape by motor vehicle...
...The present is measured by beauty, the most valuable commodity in Vegas after money...
...And when it comes to just plain unfolding a tale, he has few rivals...
...The one man who is different-rich, self-suffi-cent, intelligent-Is Mel, Pepper's fiance...
...Later, Harmony discovers that Bonventre has kicked her out because he intends to hire her 16-year-old daughter, Pepper, and thinks little of topless mother-daughter acts...
...She raises goats, thinking she may train them for an act, but between garage sales, vodka and frolics with her favorite beast, Maude, she hasn't much time to be an educator...
...The three-particularly the heroine, Molly-are bound to one another above all by the few square miles of ranch land where they spend their lifetimes...
...Their fates are inevitably the same...
...Happily, in his ninth novel, McMurtry has once again found a form and setting that allow his story to tell itself...
...The major players are the restless youth of Thalia, a poor West Texas cattle town...
...Still, the over-the-hill dancer remains cheerful: "For herself she didn't worry too much, she still loved being in the show, plus there was a lot to like about life if you could make a little effort and look on the bright side...
...The only history to contend with is the accumulation of days in a life...
...His best, though, is Leaving Cheyenne, an American masterpiece about the love of a woman and two men...
Vol. 66 • November 1983 • No. 21
