Goodbye, Danny

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.

To 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 him). We keep on waiting for Danny to check in at a shrink's office; he's actually too busy blaming everyone else for his social and romantic failures to try and analyze himself. He is too nice a person, too much a writer, he thinks, to be able to actually hurt anyone. Unfortunately, McMurtry thinks so too.

The novel is a rambling series of anecdotes about Danny's travels. He starts off in an incredibly suburban vision of Houston as a student at Rice University: He skids through school with honors, reading and writing when he good and wants to, and playing badminton with neighborhood rich folk. He impulsively marries a long-legged blonde he though he had saved from a crazed bisexual professor at an Austin party. The blonde is, in fact, dumb and the professor rather decent. With his new wife and his first novel advance money, he emigrates to San Francisco, loses his wife to a motorcycle bum, falls in love with an L.A. cartoonist whom he meets while scripting the film made from his novel, and becomes justly depressed when she turns out to be frigid. They split: he returns to Texas, and she to a cameraman she loved before she even met Danny. After another series of extra and marital mishaps, including screwing two other men's wives (one of them that of his best friend), Danny gets roughed up by cops on the Mexican border, emotionally salved by a Mexican whore, and peyoted by a kindly gas station attendant. At that point, in the midst of an hallucinogenic trip, the novel ends.

ALL 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 of cop-out:

...and if they came, my friends, they wouldn't know why I loved the river, why I loved any of the people I loved ... and none of them could guess, only maybe Jill could, I knew only Jill could, if I had stayed, if she had stayed, I could tell her, she might guess, she had the clearest eyes, the straightest look, the most honest face, I missed it so--but ah no, no chance, better to just want rivers--Jill was gone.

There is a little more to the book than that kind of thing. There are beautiful lyric passages of Texas flash-floods and sunsets. There are swell jabs at "artistic" San Francisco hangers-on, mindless but elegant Harvardians slumming in Hollywood, and New York publishing pariahs who know all the names of their authors, but none of the 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.

BUT THE 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 the moral purity of children, and displays an inability to come to grips with any kind of responsibility besides a child-like, obedient one. McMurtry breeds an insidious variety of pathetic sentimentality, and as the film versions of his work are churned out with increasing regularity, we can only hope that this adolescent point-of-view does not become as popular and prevalent as it was in the fifties.