Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...further Hollywood history: In 1988, Chase-Riboud finished a draft of her novel about the Amistad, which was sent by her pal, Jacqueline Onassis, to Amblin, Spielberg's production company. Executives read the book and made nice noises but ended up passing on it. So one can imagine Chase-Riboud's consternation when she read in Variety last fall that Spielberg would be directing Amistad...
Writing a sequel to a rare, magical novel can be a dodgy undertaking, and it's not hard to see why. The fine first novel gets done, let's say, because an enchanted story taps the author on the shoulder and titanic characters rage to be let loose. The sequel trundles along, often as not, merely because writer and readers want to spend more time with people they've grown fond of. The forces at work aren't as powerful, and enchantment can be elusive. It could be a letdown, for instance, to learn that Ishmael, rescued by the Rachel...
McMurtry's new novel is both sequel and prequel, chronologically the second installment, though written last, of a four-part saga whose splendid third book (written first) is that most beguiling of all horse operas, 1985's Lonesome Dove. A raunchy, sentimental narration about a couple of old Texas Rangers on a cattle drive, this Pulitzer prizewinner was McMurtry at the absolute top of his form. The author, as much in love with Lonesome Dove as his readers were, contrived a sequel, Streets of Laredo (1993). It was pale and sad because Gus McCrae, one of his heroes, was dead...
Call and McCrae are the author's unsolved problems. In Lonesome Dove they were amusing middle-aged adolescents, which seemed to be the author's gloss on the American West. This means, however, that in the long present novel they spend many, many chapters not maturing: Gus mooning for his lost Clara, and Woodrow being cold to Maggie, his son's mother. When they turn sideways on stage, they are seen to be band-sawed from plywood, a drawback that at last seems to matter...
Lost Man's River is another kind of troublesome sequel, a second swat at an obsession that has buzzed around the author's head for a decade or more. Killing Mister Watson, published in 1990, was Matthiessen's impressive, exasperating novel about the shooting, in 1910, of a man named E. J. Watson, by a mob of angry townsmen in southwest Florida. Was Watson a hardworking planter and family man who paid his bills and helped his neighbors, or a bar brawler and casual gunman who killed his hired hands rather than pay them at the end of the cane...