In The Evening Star, Larry McMurray brings us up to date on one of the most beloved novels, Terms of Endearment - and one of his most memorable characters, Aurora Greenway, along with her family, friends, and lovers, in this richly imagined and satisfying tale.
At once loving and comic, but always bittersweet with the unexpected turns and failures of life, The Evening Star is McMurty at his best, Aurora's old boyfriend, the General, is nearly ninety, though still feisty, as she consoles herself for his impotence with a cast of aging admirers who will eventually be supplanted by a younger man- a psychoanalyst whom she has sought out for therapy because of the General's decline. Her daughter Emma's children, in Aurora's care since Emma's death and Flap's gradual withdrawal into a new life, are not much of a consolation. Tommy is in Huntsville prison for shooting his girlfriend, with no apparent desire to get out or even to try living. Teddy and his live-in lover, Jane, are two high-IQ geniuses who met as psychiatric patients, and their baby, Bump, is a genius who won't talk. Melanie, overweight and pregnant, is making a dish for California with the latest in a long line of unsatisfactory boyfriends. Even Patsy, Emma's best friends, now twice divorced, is having problems with her children.
Form Aurora, for her maid Rosie, for Patsy, it is the time of the evening of coming to grips in various ways with middle age (in Patsy's case), or old age, or the narrowing down of things, and of having to deal, simultaneously, with the opening p of things for children and grandchildren- in short, life.
The Evening Star is McMurtry at his very best, warm, so tuned to the feelings and needs and desires of the characters that they take on a reality unique in American fiction, at once full of comic invention and a deep understanding of the fact that nobody's life ever turns out quite as planned - not even Aurora Greenway's.