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1.0 out of 5 stars
The "Houston Trilogy" happily comes to an end., April 4 2004
Every novelist of note has at least one work that represents the low mark in that author's career. With Larry McMurtry, I thought that novel was "Moving On", a lumbering work of uninteresting characters, rediculous plot lines and a writing style that could only be described as sophomoric. Then McMurtry decided to re-visit some of the characters of that earlier novel, throw in a few more from "All My Friends Are Going to be Strangers" and complete his so-called "Houston Trilogy". You would think that with the tepid results of the first two novels he would have given up on his idea and returned to the area that he can really write about: the vanishing frontier. But no, he had to finish his trilogy. In his preface to the book (an act of unmitigated audaciousness, by the way; as if the novel deserved a preface and as if the women characters created here could somehow be in the same league as Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina), McMurtry remarked that the novel was about the dilemma in which many women find themselves: stuck with a boring husband who happens to be a pretty good father. He questions, "Emma might with luck find a better husband than Flap, but can she realistically expect to better him as a father? Is anyone apt to love the kids as much as he does?" Only if he had written about that dilemma. On second thought, that dilemma never existed in the first place because Flap is not a good father and spends as much time away from home as he does with the family.Instead the reader is "treated" to the story of an aging widow, Aurora Greenway, and her equally aging suitors and the activities that surround her vapid existence in 1960s Houston. Her daughter, Emma, occupies a secondary role in this portion of the novel and the action moves from dinner party to forays into the Houston suburbs, from one uninteresting character to the next, from the improbability of a millionaire who lives on the top level of a parking structure to a hastily concocted murder attempt - all I guess to try to maintain the reader's, as well as the author's, interest. But all this meaningless writing in search of a plot finally forces McMurtry to make a decision: either change course or follow Aurora's story until the author, himself, drops dead. So after 360 pages of a 410 page book, the story suddenly shifts to Emma and her pathetic life: infidelity, neurotic children, and finally cancer - all this, by the way, in fifty pages. What amazes me is that James L. Brooks, the director and screenwriter of the movie, could have read this book and even considered making a film based on it. What he created, which is a testament to what good screen writing is all about, not only elevates McMurtry's novel from the humdrum but centers on the dilemma that the novel's author chose not to pursue. The scenes between the principal characters are often electric, capturing the anger, frustration, and love between wife, mother and husband, something that McMurtry only managed to duplicate only once or twice in the novel. One more point of irritation: the seduction scene between Danny Deck and Emma is taken almost word for word from "All My Friends Are Going to be Strangers", something akin to a college freshman composition student quoting himself in a term paper.
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