Word: decking
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...thoughts behind them. Most impressive is a long episode focussed on an economic South Texas uncle, who lives on a huge sheep ranch, and does nothing but eat, curse out his Mexican help, and jeep over to his wife on another ranch a few miles away. At least Deck confronts a sentimentalized image of his past in this situation and realizes that the reality behind it is perverse and cruel...
...DANNY DECK, the hero of Larry McMurtry's `EGIBLE> novel, is the kind of writer which, when I was 16, I thought I'd become at 20. In All My Friends Are Going to be Strangers, he pulls adolescent pranks which upset whole families and mortify his best friends, and McMurtry chalks them all up as the natural actions of a sensitive, unspoiled artist. Since McMurtry himself has a very likable writing talent, rarely has so dull a conception of a novel proved so pitiable a waste of time...
...McMurtry, Deck is a questioning innocent, emerging from a stultifying Texas atmosphere (which at the same time he can't help loving), while also trying to find his personal identity. It's the classic American unsatisfying-success story. You finally escape from the conglomerate of emotional inputs you call home, but you find that the big world isn't that different. If Danny hops from state to state and bed to bed, what he really needs is a mother. (All McMurtry gives him is a father who has just about disowned him, and a bunch of brothers who ignore...
...THAT ties it together is Danny Deck's personality. He's unpretentious, but that's no virtue when everything analytic or intellectual is viewed as pretentious. He's ironically cutting, at times, but only if we accept Deck's emotional motivations as being more pure than those of the people he attacks. Mostly he is just sweet and silly, and that does get tiresome...
There are moments when we think McMurtry is up to Deck's primitive I-am-an-artist game. When Deck's cartoonist-lover feels that he does not understand her own pain, she tells him that he just isn't used to thinking about people. But then she adds that Deck is everything any woman should want (especially if she already has a nice apartment). And the entire novel ends with a glorification...