Word: decks
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...dominant dewy-eyed side of Deck is at the heart of the book, and the glorification of such characters never ceases to frighten me -- particularly when someone like McMurtry portrays him as charming and attractive. If we are meant to recognize the ridiculousness of the existence of such a figure in the modern world, McMurtry's techniques do not convey it. I respect McMurtry's desire not to remove himself from the grounds of his inspiration, and to continually deal with the settings and people he really cares about. But his work, for all its regional color, only dramatizes...
...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...