Low Slapstick with High Ambitions
ALLEN, BROOKE
Low Slapstick with High Ambitions Sin Killer By Larry McMurtry Simon & Schuster. 300 pp. $25.00. Reviewed by Brooke Allen Contributor, New York "Times Book Review," "New...
...Lady Berrybender (or Lady Constance) is a drunken slut...
...Subsequent volumes will follow them to the Yellowstone, Rio Grande and Brazos Rivers...
...She was done with Englishness, done with family...
...one of the children mysteriously disappears...
...The idea of the Old World as degenerate and corrupt (personified here in the vile Lord Berrybender) is a hoary clich...
...They are definitely cartoonish, but because he has loaded them with a certain thematic significance, in the end we don't know what to think...
...Lady Berrybender falls and breaks her neck...
...too bad McMurtry didn't put a fraction of the effort into researching the English background that he did the American...
...An allegory...
...Our West is not much like your gentle England," the ship's captain says...
...In its place we get what might pass as scanty and unremarkable backdrops for a vaudeville act...
...McMurtry has spent most of his days in Texas, where his father and eight of his uncles were cowboys and ranchers...
...Guess again...
...The unskillful prose and the ridiculous grotesqueries of the characters are so blatant that the book's few strengths are liable to escape the reader...
...Lord Berrybender loses toes, a foot and several fingers— including his trigger finger—in a series of grisly accidents...
...So when he nevertheless announced the first installment of a planned tetralogy set in the same place and time, it was reasonable to assume he wanted to relate a story of great personal or historical import, or he wished to experiment with a new style...
...Even emotion, something this author's novels have never lacked, has been drained from these pages...
...Tasmin imagines herself in the middle of a James Fenimore Cooper novel, with the Sin Killer in the role of Hawkeye...
...Sin Killer describes the progress of what McMurtry calls "a great English sporting family," the Berrybenders, as they travel along the Missouri River and brave the dangerous wilderness in the 1830s...
...Is it a comedy...
...They have commandeered a large steamboat and are journeying down the river with their extensive family and entourage: children Tasmin (our heroine), Bobbety, Bess, Mary, and 10 unnamed others...
...Gone is the famous ear, the marvelous ability to create utterly realistic dialogue...
...The New World rums out to be a more raw and dangerous place than they can comprehend...
...If McMurtry knew exactly what tone or style he was aiming for, those ingredients might have gone toward making a real novel, rather than a facetious and pointless fantasy...
...Instead, the characters use a bizarre language never before spoken on land or sea—presumably an approximation of how McMurtry thinks English people of the era spoke, if, that is, he has derived all his knowledge on the subject from Regency romancenovels...
...It is hard to tell whether that is supposed to be credible, or whether McMurtry is shooting for fine artificiality...
...Both titles cannot be correct...
...various characters get kidnapped by Indians...
...Actually, it is a little of all these things, but they don't add up to anything much...
...she cast off, quite literally, her muddy clothes and waded out, drenched and shivering, into the waters of the New World, determined to make her life, somehow, on the vast prairies of America, where she would never again be without the purities of the great embracing light...
...Now, at the age of 66, with more than 30 books behind him, he definitely does not need to keep boiling the pot...
...Sin Killer, far from being the clever postmodern jeu d'esprit he may have intended, is broad, heavy, low slapstick with high ambitions...
...Tasmin alone is open to the beauty of the country: "With the huge sky drawing her eyes upward toward infinity, she felt at one with an earthly magnificence that her tidy island upbringing had left her unprepared to imagine...
...But just how gentle was England in 1832...
...the only problem is that it's inexplicably awful...
...If a man's got killing in him, the West will draw it out...
...plus a few real historical figures thrown in, like Sacagawea's husband, Toussaint Charbonneau, and the painter George Catlin...
...Indeed, it is hard to imagine what the work is supposed to be...
...so is the vision of Europe as tame and America wild...
...McMurtry has lost touch with his trademark skills, without achieving anything new in the process...
...The prospect of three sequels is a little daunting...
...Duane Moore, his running character, a Texan version of John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom, embodies the ambitions and disappointments of middle-class Western manhood in the second half of the 20th century...
...Sin Killer is as simpleminded as a children's story, although too full of sex —or, as it is called in the novel, fornication or tupping—to be read by children...
...Tasmin is apparently meant to be the new Eve, and no sooner has she shed her clothing than she meets the new Adam, likewise naked: He is Jim Snow, an absurdly strong and silent man—the antithesis of the Berrybenders of course— called the "Sin Killer," for his intolerance of blasphemy...
...Reviewed by Brooke Allen Contributor, New York "Times Book Review," "New Criterion,' "Atlantic Monthly" Larry McMurtry has had an enviable career...
...Oh fiddle, a pox on Samuel Richardson," Tasmin says, deep in intellectual conversation with a friendly Jesuit...
...A black comedy...
...He is one of the few American authors who has garnered genuine critical respect and won a Pulitzer Prize forfiction, while alsoenjoying broad popularity and financial success: bestsellers, movie adaptations (Hud, Terms of Endearment, The Last Picture Show), and a hit TV miniseries (Lonesome Dove...
...Sounds intriguing...
...But even then it is a failure, too slack an effort to be effective...
...Sometimes he is referred to as Lord Berrybender, sometimes as Lord Albany Berrybender...
...After the publication of Comanche Moon (1997), the author said that would be his last word on the 19th-century American West: He had exhausted the subject...
...McMurtry seems to be under the impression that a dowry is a sum of money given by the prospective husband to the wife's father, like an African bride-price, instead of the other way around...
...an English tutor, a Fräulein, a Mademoiselle, a luscious cellist who doubles as Lord Berrybender's concubine, a local captain, three Indian chiefs of different tribes, a Dutch botanist, a Dane...
...Adults will find it vapid...
...All those tears over a little tupping...
...The characters in Sin Killer, especially the English ones, speak a fancifully affected jargon, Henry Fielding as reimagined by the writers of Blackadder...
...Similarly, he seems to have misplaced his well-known knack for visualizing landscapes...
...A great bore, I say...
...The gifts that have accounted for McMurtry's success over the years are nowhere in evidence here...
...Are the Berrybenders and their entourage supposed to be believable characters, or simply cartoons...
...The Berrybenders and their hangerson are a motley bunch...
...McMurtry appears not to have decided...
...His novels have crystallized a certain antiheroic vision of the West's landscapes and people...
...Not very...
...McMurtry does know the history of the region, and he is able to imagine richly some of the numerous odd types who might have assembled along the banks of the Missouri in 1832: Indians from a complex mixture of tribes, with different customs, dress and reactions to one another as well as to the encroaching whites...
...I confess I could not get through Clarissa...
...Tasmin and the Sin Killer fall in love, but she cannot escape her unattractive and unfortunate family...
...Tasmin marries the Sin Killer, much to the distress of Lord Berrybender, who mourns the dowry he would have got by marrying her off to a Hapsburg or a Bourbon...
...The patriarch is an old maniac and sex fiend, obsessed with shooting buffalo and every other species of native game...
...He is, as he has put it, "one of the few writers who can still claim to have had prolonged and intimate contact with first-generation American pioneers...
...The Sin Killer already has two Native American wives, but he is more than man enough to handle them all...
...The other randy, dissatisfied women on the boat are jealous of her primitive new boyfriend, who occasionally hits and shakes her: "They all hoped to get ashore and find men who would shake them thus dramatically...
...Along their way the Berrybenders endure many misadventures, most of them self-inflicted...
...Perhaps the novel is a literary-historical exercise, an attempt at conscious archaism like John Barth's The Sot- Weed Factor or Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixonl Possibly...
...and the European flotsam washed up on this alien, sometimes hostile soil—including a halfRussian soothsayer and a Norwegian "ransom specialist," who makes his living buying back young captives from the Indians...
...The extended ménage represents only too clearly the effete, bad Old World: The steamer is a little Europe, argumentative, preoccupied by its own sordid amours and quarrels, oblivious to the great virgin spaces all around...
Vol. 85 • May 2002 • No. 3
