Word: novelizations
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...tell right off when a novelist knows his way around the block. Take the first sentence of Larry McMurtry's moody, sensitive, ironic yet lightheartedly despairing new novel: "Duane was in the hot tub, shooting at his new doghouse with a .44 Magnum." The Jamesian restraint of the language -- not "Blam, blam, blam, wood chips glinted in the dusty air," but a dreamlike, almost passive kind of doghouse blasting -- foreshadows subtle stuff. The hero, we sense, is a country boy (the name Duane, and the implication that there is enough vacant acreage behind the doghouse so that stray bullets...
Well, sure. What we have here is middle age, a ton of bricks anywhere, but a real stunner to Duane in Thalia, Texas. Life and geography have not prepared him for the existential blahs. He was a high school football hero of sorts in McMurtry's wry 1966 novel The Last Picture Show. Since then he has made a fair-size bundle in the oil business, but aerobic spending and the collapse of crude prices have left him ear-deep in debt, and sinking. He doesn't much care. He and his wife Karla are both good-looking and healthy...
Texasville is McMurtry's eleventh novel, and by now his wonderfully loose- jointed narrative style slips in and out of comic exaggeration with practiced ease. There are no seams between the ambling lies of the 19th century frontier yarn spinner (his literary heritage) and the slick ambiguities of the 20th century novelist. When the tall tales have room to unwind to the horizon, as they do in Lonesome Dove (1985), McMurtry's haunting legend of the last cattle drives, the result is extraordinary. This sort of storytelling works best with a lot of action, however, and the new novel describes...
...penetration of the current chancery. The high-powered panel will include former CIA Director Richard Helms and former Joint Chiefs Chairman General John Vessey. Four other groups, including the Foreign Intelligence Board, are investigating aspects of the scandal. Former CIA Official Bobby Inman last week offered a novel solution for the bugged building: Americans should "very carefully" construct three secure floors...
...nuclear attack upon the U.S. is considered imminent, authority to use nuclear weapons is automatically "predelegated" to various military commanders. For a nation that mistakenly assumes only the President's finger is ever on the button, this little-known fact will come as a disconcerting discovery. In his first novel, State Scarlet (Putnam; $18.95), David Aaron, a top staffer at the National Security Council during the Carter Administration, uses fiction to show how the nation's command, control and communications system, known as C 3, could spin out of control during a crisis...