Terms of Endearment by Larry McMurtry

First published: 1975

Type of plot: Domestic/seriocomic realism

Time of work: The 1960’s and the 1970’s

Locale: Houston, Texas; Des Moines, Iowa; and Kearney and Omaha, Nebraska

Principal Characters:

• Aurora Greenway, an affluent, middle-aged widow
• Emma Horton, Aurora’s daughter
• Rosie Dunlup, Aurora’s maid
• Vernon Dalhart, a Texas oilman, one of Aurora’s suitors
• General Hector Scott, a retired military man who is later Aurora’s principal suitor
• Thomas “Flap” Horton, Emma’s husband, a young academic

The Novel

Aurora Greenway, a selfish, fanciful widow, spends much of her rather empty life talking on the telephone to her daughter, Emma. They talk nearly every morning at seven-thirty (often to Emma’s chagrin—unlike her mother, she is not an early riser), and it is around their problematic relationship that the novel is built. Terms of Endearment is divided into two books of unequal length: The first, longer book covers a single year (1962) in the life of Aurora Greenway; the second book, a fraction the length of the first, is devoted to the last five years (1971-1976) of Emma’s short life. This disproportionate division reflects the central tragedy of the novel: Emma has always lived in her mother’s shadow, has never lived up to the older woman’s expectations. The brief final section of the novel is as stunted and formless as Emma’s self-esteem.

Since she has been left financially independent by a shadowy, seldom-mentioned husband, Aurora Greenway has little to do with her days except receive and reject her various suitors, and much of the first part of the novel is devoted to her seriocomic relationships with men. She is proud of the fact that most men are terrified of her exacting standards and her erratic behavior. She plays one beau off against another, juggling luncheon and dinner dates with great virtuosity and actively encouraging jealousy among her suitors. When one man is deemed too dull or too overbearing, he is dropped and soon replaced by a new, more pliant subject. This rather reckless game is Aurora’s method of coping with widowhood; her indolent though well-mannered husband, Rudyard, has been dead for three years when the novel opens. Her elegant house in the River Oaks section of Houston is filled with beautiful objects, her closets with expensive clothes. Her existence is diverting and leisurely but ultimately unfulfilling.

In stark contrast to her mother’s frivolous, self-absorbed life is Emma’s own. When the novel opens, Emma has been married for two years to “Flap” Horton, a college English major who can provide her with no better a residence than a garage apartment. The marriage is unsatisfying on every level: The couple’s sex life is perfunctory and unimaginative, and their conversations frequently end in violent but comic confrontations. Aurora is probably correct in her assessment that Emma has married badly. Only two years into the marriage, Flap’s interest in his wife is waning, and they are expecting their first child (it is born at the close of the first book). Emma spends her days reading the newspaper classified ads, seeing her beautiful and self-assured friend Patsy Clark, and talking on the telephone with her alternately judgmental and solipsistic mother.

Since the novel has no consistent point of view, McMurtry is able to move easily in and out of his characters’ consciousnesses; thus, what would pass for subplots in other novels will receive much attention in Terms of Endearment. Much of the first book, for example, is devoted to Rosie Dunlup, Aurora’s hapless maid of twenty-two years, whose unexciting marriage parallels both Aurora’s and Emma’s lack of fulfillment. Royce, Rosie’s truck-driver husband and the father of her seven children, is a philanderer with a fondness for low-life bars and disreputable women. During the course of the first book, Rosie finds out about her husband’s secret life. Their tragicomic separations and reconciliations are conducted in the lower-middle-class world of country and western dance halls and drive-ins, a world far removed from Aurora’s River Oaks domain. Rosie is more than a servant, and the bond between the Greenway women and their maid is strong, though mostly unarticulated.

Toward the end of the first book, Aurora experiences a mid-life crisis of sorts. Now a grandmother (Emma’s first child, Thomas, has been born), she sets about acclimating her chosen mate, sixty-seven-year-old General Hector Scott, to her other suitors, having no intention of dropping them altogether. Unable to find the perfect man, Aurora decides to make do with many, and by the end of the first book she has somewhat come to terms with the compromises with which she must live out her days.

Emma’s sad story comprises the brief second book, which opens in 1971 in Des Moines, where Flap has taken a job as a college English instructor. Flap, doomed to a life of academic mediocrity, has long since lost interest in his wife, and both of them have started having affairs. They are responsible, if lackluster, parents to their two sons, Tommy and Teddy; a third child, Melanie, is born soon after the family moves to Kearney, Nebraska, where Flap becomes a department head.

Emma’s life as a faculty wife is bleak. She has few friends, and what time she has away from her children she spends with a string of unremarkable lovers. Unlike her mother’s, Emma’s romantic involvements are highly physical but essentially unrewarding. Never prey to the romantic self-delusion that sustains Aurora, Emma has long since given up on happiness. She is hard-pressed to find even momentary diversion in her joyless and aimless life.

The novel’s climax occurs when it is discovered that Emma has an incurable form of cancer. Her impending death transforms her into the kind of catalyst she has never been in life: Aurora, Rosie, General Scott, and Aurora’s failed suitor Vernon Dalhart arrive from Houston to be at Emma’s bedside in Omaha; her friend Patsy leaves her fairy-tale life in Hollywood to watch Emma die. Heavily sedated, Emma lies dying for months, experiencing a sort of death-in-life that is really no more than an intensification of the life that she has led for years. She accepts death with few regrets, having long given up on life. Aurora’s reaction to her daughter’s death is notably unsentimental. Standing dry-eyed at Emma’s graveside, she turns to Patsy and says, “There’s no point in us standing here like bookends, my dear,” thus having, as usual, the last word.

The Characters

The characterization of Aurora Greenway is strong enough to make every other character in the novel seem like a mere foil. With the possible exception of the strong-willed Rosie, everyone who comes into even momentary contact with Aurora is dominated by her, and she has kept many of the novel’s characters in tow for decades. At least three of her suitors (a term she insists upon with characteristic Victorian propriety) have been kept waiting for thirty years. Aurora Greenway is a woman who, despite her strong need for love and attention, keeps other people at a distance. Her perfectionism and her lack of self-criticism prevent her from becoming too close to anyone—including, sadly, her only child.

In many ways, Aurora is an anachronistic character, out of place in post-World War II America. A stickler for gracious manners and seemly behavior, Aurora values form over content. She is fanatically concerned with physical appearance, her own and that of her suitors: She will forgive a man much if he is well dressed. Aurora Greenway is in many ways reminiscent of the coquettes of nineteenth century British fiction. She is a self-absorbed romantic who has never questioned her right to everything and everyone she desires. A sensualist who loves to feel the wet grass beneath her bare feet and who delights above all else in good food and drink, she is also capable of surprising coldness and insensitivity. Her relationships with her suitors are for the most part old-fashionedly chaste and formal. Physical love is both a weapon for and a threat to Aurora, and it is not surprising that her comfortable but passionless marriage to the attractive Rudyard Greenway produced only one child.

Unfortunately, Aurora is the only fully developed major character in the novel. The other characters seem too obviously calculated to highlight various aspects of Aurora’s character, a fault which extends to the characterization of Emma. The reader is told little of Emma’s childhood and must intuit from Emma’s and her mother’s characters how Emma developed into such a markedly defeated adult. Still, this incomplete characterization is somewhat justified by the extent to which Aurora’s life has overshadowed her daughter’s. Emma serves both as a contrast to Aurora and as an embodiment of the shortcomings of Aurora’s methods of dealing with people. Dumpy, badly dressed, and careless of her appearance, Emma has never measured up to her mother’s expectations. She has made a bad marriage largely, one suspects, to escape Aurora’s domination, but Aurora will not relinquish control, and continues to criticize her daughter almost daily with her early morning telephone calls. Nor does Emma receive support from the other people in her life. To the constantly distracted Flap, she is little more than a cook and a bed partner. Her attractive and poised friend Patsy, while genuinely devoted to Emma, is in some ways a younger version of Aurora and almost certainly the kind of woman that Aurora wanted her daughter to become. Emma Horton is surrounded by reminders of her own inadequacies. Her death from cancer is the symbolically appropriate end to a life totally lacking in self-esteem.

The novel’s minor characters, especially Aurora’s numerous suitors, are among the most interesting and successful elements of the novel. Vernon Dalhart, a fifty-year-old oil millionaire who has never before been in love, is a colorful and eccentric Texas character, capable of running a business empire, but helpless in the presence of the domineering Aurora. General Hector Scott, an aging military man who lives down the street from Aurora, shares with Vernon an easy authority in the masculine world and a complete bewilderment at Aurora’s maddeningly feminine character. Completing the group of Aurora’s most devoted suitors are Alberto, a retired operatic tenor, and Trevor Waugh, a suave and sophisticated yachtsman, both of whom bring an element of the bittersweet to Aurora’s saga.

Rosie Dunlup, Aurora’s long-suffering maid, occupies a central position in Terms of Endearment as the hardworking, realistic foil to Aurora’s solipsism and indolence. Her relationship with the Greenway women is successfully executed, but the plot involving her perennial marital troubles is too often handled with condescension and a certain vulgarity. The lower-middle-class world of Rosie’s Lyons Avenue home does not add very much to the reader’s understanding of Aurora Greenway and Emma Horton, although it does function thematically to emphasize the universality of unhappy love relationships.

Critical Context

In the 1960’s, Larry McMurtry established his reputation with a series of novels that dealt realistically with rural and small-town Texas. In Horseman, Pass By (1961), Leaving Cheyenne (1963), and The Last Picture Show (1966), McMurtry gave a new twist to the time-honored American genre of the Western. These novels all treat a Texas in a state of flux, still deeply captivated by the myth of the cowboy but increasingly confronted with the realities of industrial America. The mythology of the American West has gone stale: The ranch has been replaced by the oil field, the frontiersman by the bureaucrat. The fictional town of Thalia becomes the locus of the confrontation between past and present.

Terms of Endearment is the third of a sequence of novels set in the changing urban Southwest of the 1960’s and 1970’s. The first two novels in this loose trilogy, Moving On (1970) and All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers (1972), deal with characters at least tangentially related to Emma Horton. Danny Deck, for example, the young writer who figures in both Moving On and Terms of Endearment, is the protagonist of All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers. Though these later novels take place in the urban rather than the rural Southwest of McMurtry’s novels of the 1960’s, they share some of the regionalism of the earlier books. Terms of Endearment is a book strongly influenced by its setting: Aurora Greenway is intensely proud of her New England heritage and clings to Yankee culture in her Spanish home in Houston; a character such as Vernon Dalhart is virtually unthinkable outside Texas.

The film version of Terms of Endearment received the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1983. Earlier, all three of the 1960’s novels were adapted to the screen, the best known being the 1971 film version of The Last Picture Show. The popularity of Larry McMurtry’s novels and of their film adaptations is hardly surprising in an era in which much of the focus of American society has been moving from the industrial centers of the North to the rapidly developing South and Southwest.

Bibliography

Busby, Mark and Tom Pilkington. Larry McMurtry and the West: An Ambivalent Relationship. Denton, Tex.: University of North Texas Press, 1995. Offers a comprehensive overview of McMurtry’s fiction, including insights on film versions of his novels. Also includes bibliographical references and an index.

Cawelti, John G. “What Rough Beast—-New Westerns?” ANQ 9 (Summer, 1996): 4-15. Cawelti addresses the revival of the Western in print, film, and on television. He notes that the new genre reflects the loss of the mythic West of the past and shows how the contemporary Western, instead of glorifying the American spirit, now criticizes America’s shortcomings. Although this essay does not directly address Terms of Endearment, it offers an illuminating perspective on McMurtry’s fiction.

Jones, Malcolm. “The Poet Lariat.” Newsweek (January 11, 1999): 62. Briefly discusses the film versions of McMurtry’s novels, including Terms of Endearment. Offers an interesting profile on McMurtry’s life and work.

Jones, Roger Walton. Larry McMurtry and the Victorian Novel. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1994. Jones explores McMurtry’s lifelong love of Victorian authors and explores three Victorian themes that are prominent in all of McMurtry’s fiction: the individual’s importance in society, the conflict between society and nature, and the search for a coherent spirituality in an age that does not believe in God.