Terms of Endearment and The Evening Star are two of Larry McMurtry's best known novels, they are actually books #3 and #6 of his Houston series. Mind you, they are not the Western genre. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry created two characters who won the hearts of readers and moviegoers everywhere--Aurora Greenway and her daughter Emma. Through three very different books (Moving On, All My Friends are Going to be strangers, Terms of Endearment) we see Emma as what women are at their best. She saw life clearly, and survived her own clear knowledge. This is Larry's last of the Houston trilogy.
This is about Memorable mother and her feisty daughter who find the courage and humor to live through life's hazards and to love each other as never before. The times depicted here are the early 1960s and 70s in Texas and we encounter wives being beaten by bad husbands, double standards everywhere for women, and too many disappointments to share, but Aurora and her daughter, Emma, also represent, at different times, the maiden, the mother, the queen and the crone. Through them, we are able to see both the limitations and the potential for all women, at all times. A book with 418 pages, but will not let you down.
Aurora comes with a very large footprint, big, loud, moody, demanding and argumentative (they’re her good qualities) – she’s also a chronic flirt and has a conga-line of middle-aged men following her around with their tongues hanging out. They’re totally obsessed with her, all craving her hand in marriage and they make no secret of that fact. Aurora Greenway, nearing her fiftieth year, is a very memorable character. Larry McMurty gave us brief glimpses of a woman that has a hard outer core but a soft middle. Aurora has one daughter, Emma, and a string of suitors. She is not very nice to any of them – most of the time! Aurora wants the best for her daughter, but she has a ruthless way of showing it. Emma is married to an absolute tool called “Flap” – a character totally devoid of any good qualities at all. None. What the hell did Emma see in him? Mother and daughter talk and argue with each other almost daily. When Emma announces that she's going to have a baby, Aurora throws a fit, horribly despondent that no suitor will be interested in wooing her when they discover that the forty-nine year old widow is a grandmother. Emma's husband of two years Thomas "Flap" Horton, an egocentric English professor, is not there to defend his wife through the tirade, though it occurs to Emma he wouldn't have risen to challenge Aurora if he had been there.
When she's not hectoring her daughter, Aurora--who lives in Houston's wealthy River Oaks neighborhood on far less capital than people assume--entertains herself with a parade of suitors. There's Hector, a retired general who lives down the block but tries Aurora's nerve by attempting to regiment her flighty behavior. There's Alberto, an Italian opera star in his twilight whose romantic gestures Aurora is much more tolerant of. Her flirtation even inspires the hopes of Royce, the deliveryman husband of her maid of twenty-two years and best friend, Rosie Dunlop. Aurora returns home to discover that Royce lost his temper with Rosie and hit the mother of his seven children.
A dark horse for Aurora's affection is Vernon Dalhart, a diminutive oilman whose bumper Aurora swipes while returning from breakfast with the general. Vernon, a boyish, laid back millionaire of fifty, has two telephones, a television and an ice cooler in his car, which he uses as his primary residence, docking at the end of each day on the roof of a parking garage he owns in downtown Houston. Vernon tells Aurora that he's in love for the first time in his life, but insecure that he'll tire of her moods quickly and run off to one of his oilfields, Aurora relegates Vernon to the role of Johnny on the Spot, a clutch friend whose resourcefulness she comes to lean on in hard times.
While Emma notices that Flap has been paying her more attention sexually, their marriage is poisoned. Whether her habit of reading the classified ads before any other section of the newspaper is the problem, or his flirtations with Emma's best friend Patsy Carpenter, or that the two hate each other despite bringing a child into the world together, neither of them have the courage to divorce. When Flap finally loses his cool with his bride and tries to push her through their bedroom window, Emma picks herself up and shrugs it off, taking Patsy to her mother's for one of her legendary breakfasts and an update on the soap opera over there.Emma migrates with her husband to Des Moines, where she gives birth to three children but ultimately, discovers her health is more vulnerable than her marriage.
She noticed that everyone in the hospital assumed that she was finished. They were polite; they were not perfunctory, but essentially they let her be. It was her own people, not the doctors, who kept pressuring her to get well enough to go home for a while. They all seemed to think it must be what she wanted, but Emma resisted. If she had had the chance she might have gone home and dug in, but she knew she had no chance--knew it from what she felt, not from what she had been told. Once she accepted that, then she accepted the hospital. For those who could be cured, it was a hospital, but for her it was a depot, a kind of bus station; she was there to be transported out of life, and because it was ugly and bare and smelled bad and was run impersonally by hired functionaries, that which was never easy--a departure--could at least be handled efficiently. She didn't want to go home, because at home the warmth and good smells of her life would be overpowering. Her children would drag at her, with their love, their brilliance, and their needs. She would become vulnerable to her little joys: her soap operas, washing Melanie's fantastic hair, Tommy's newest book and Teddy's hug, a nice dawdle with Richard, some Hollywood gossip from Patsy. If she went home, it would hurt too much to die; also it would hurt those who were losing her.
A strength of Terms of Endearment and Larry McMurtry's epics is their variety. Once the story begins, McMurtry reveals that Aurora isn't so fearless and Emma isn't so submissive. I loved the brush the author paints the city of Houston with, from the mists that roll in from the Gulf to an all-nite diner near the Astrodome that Vernon Dalhart is partial to. His advisers compel him to give Aurora a pet goat, which seems like something that could only happen in Houston or in a Larry McMurtry novel.
The novel is separated into two books. Emma's Mother sprawls across 349 pages The last section called Book II, Mrs Greenway’s Daughter (Emma) 1971-1976 is overwhelmingly powerful, turns into one of the most profound and emotionally vibrant exposes on death.
“She had made every effort to remain active, to keep open to life, and yet life was beginning to resist her in unexpected ways. Men, some of them decent and good, seemed to march through her life almost daily, and yet they caused so little to stir within her that she had begun to be afraid – not just that nothing would ever stir again, but that she would stop wanting it to, cease caring whether it did or not, or even come to prefer that it didn’t.”
To Emma: “I’ve never allowed myself to be resigned to anything that wasn’t delightful, and nothing about your life is delightful that I can see. You must make some changes.”
About men: “The fact that most men have the same ultimate motive doesn’t mean that they have the same qualities. Desires may not vary that much, but their expressions do.”
“I’m afraid I’ve never marched to any man’s drum and I’m far too old to start now.”
“Well, if you’ve reached the stage where you’ve got to have a woman, you’re going to feel ridiculous the big part of the time anyway. I was never mixed up with nobody from further east than Little Rock neither. I never said more than howdy to a smart woman in my life, and I still went around feeling dumb half the time. They’re smarter than us – that’s what it boils down to.”
“It was inconsiderate, she thought, how blandly people mentioned the future in the sick rooms. Phrases like next summer were always popping out; people made such assumptions about their own continuity.”
This book made me laugh and cry. I liken it as a tribute to women – women of all ages, sizes, and temperaments
The book has engaging dialogue, sharp characterizations, humor, passion, and realistic life situations.
Mother and daughter make their choices. Aurora to take a cranky old general as a lover, Emma to keep her family intact. In the end the selfish mother outlives the unselfish daughter, but not because she is either more or less moral: she just had the good fortune to not get cancer.
The movie is very different from the book. Movie appears to be comedy, but book is thought provoking too. Readers who know the movie can’t help but hear Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger as they follow their stormy relationship.
Terms of Endearment dazzled critics and audiences alike with its believable, insightful story of two captivating people, mother and daughter, unforgettably played by Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger. From grand slapstick to deepest sentiment, director James L. Brooks masterfully paints scenes from their evolving 30-year relationship.
This movie is available on Amazon see here: https://amzn.to/2tZzTPh
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