Why couldn't she, for once, be attracted to strength? Why did so many men look so quivery when you looked at them hard? Why did the slight of a man she liked or perhaps loved, make her feel so alone?
Larry McMurtry, The Evening Star
Aurora Greenway, the central character in Terms of Endearment, returns in this sequel older but not necessarily wiser. Now in her 70s, Aurora shares her bed with Hector, a retired general a decade older. But Hector no longer satisfies in that bed, so she remains open to other possibilities, including her much younger analyst, Jerry.
Rosie, her longtime maid, is a woman of similar age with similar appetites. Over the years their relationship has become a close friendship, even if one does work for the other. They complain that men are weak jerks, yet they are always on the hunt for these men, much like the aging women in McMurtry's later novel Loop Group.
The novel has a large cast of characters that includes Aurora's three troubled grandchildren (Emma, her daughter, died in the earlier novel) and her great-grandchildren. As the novel opens, Tommy is in prison for murder. Teddy suffers from mental illness, as does his wife and apparently their infant son, Bump. Melanie, the plump granddaughter, lives her life trying to please a boyfriend who keeps leaving her for hotter women, then returning. But by the end of the novel, which covers a number of years, all three of these grandchildren manage to make something like success out of their lives.
McMurtry constantly flips the novel's point of view from one character to another, sometimes as often as three or four times in a couple of pages. Even the babies have a point of view, which is how we suspect Bump may not exactly be a well-balanced child.
Old people eventually die, and death finds a number of the characters in this novel, including Aurora herself. Even so McMurtry's narrative remains light and breezy, often hilarious, sometimes wise and always compelling. And so the pages keep flying by.
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