By page 250 of his intensely lively new novel, The Late Child (461 pages. Simon & Schuster. $25), even Larry McMurtry has decided that it’s time to stop and take stock of the story thus far. Let’s see, Harmony, a former Las Vegas show-girl who first appeared in McMurtry’s novel “Desert Rose,” is sitting in the apartment of her daughter Pepper’s lover, Laurie, in New York City. Pepper is dead of AIDS, and Harmony has come to grieve, accompanied by her sisters, Pat and Neddie, who has just announced that she doesn’t eat any food whose name begins with the letter “k.” There are four turbaned Indian Sikhs standing around in the apartment, too, and two black teenagers who had been living in a Dumpster in New Jersey. Harmony’s 5-year-old son, Eddie, is on the phone with the president of the United States, and in a few hours he’s due to go on the Letterman show, a celebrity by virtue of the fact that his dog, Iggy Pop, just jumped off the Statue of Liberty and lived. Whew.
The small miracle that McMurtry pulls off in this, his 18th novel, is to make these events seem, if not inevitable, then certainly believable. A dead daughter, a grief-stricken mother–in lesser hands, the circumstances could easily descend into bathos. But in McMurtry’s unsentimental fiction, life allows no time for such self-indulgence. Comedy, tragedy and absurdity constantly chase each other on and off the stage, and the winners are those who master the art of the quick change. The dour but formidable Neddie proves herself the quintessential McMurtry heroine when, while escorting her grieving sister from Las Vegas to New York, she seizes her chance to finally see the Grand Canyon. “Me and Dick meant to have a look at it on our honeymoon,” she explains, “but then the cow fell into the cistern and we never got out of Tarwater.”
McMurtry has his weak spots (sentimentalizing small children and dogs tops the list), but no writer does a better job of undermining the empty homilies about small-town life or the sanctity of family-“dysfunctional family” is always, in McMurtry’s lexicon, a redundant phrase. The acid-etched portrait of Harmony’s wretched old mother is alone worth the price of the book. And what other novelist could devise a novel around a road trip that moves from Las Vegas to New York to Washington to rural Oklahoma and sound wise in the ways of each locale?
Taken together, McMurtry’s novels comprise a fictional portrait of the American West, from cowboys and Indians to astronauts and showgirls. But there’s nothing doctrinaire about this accomplishment. His numerous sequels, while they do stitch a narrative tapestry together, are actually just an excuse for this Balzac in a Stetson to stay in touch with characters he loves. Harmony revisited, tormented by the loss of her daughter and wondering “where could you go, other than death, to be beyond memory,” holds us even tighter than she did in “Desert Rose” (1983). In this novel, the former showgirl, who met Elvis and Mr. Sinatra but only managed to sleep with character actor Dan Duryea, achieves heroic proportions. Compared with this memorable woman, even the Clintons are indeed, as one character puts it, just “two people from Arkansas.”
