They are all well-drawn, and McMurtry can't help but write well (for one thing, the book's too easy to read to ever become boring), but the reader is not in pleasant company here. McMurtry has proved, in much better books, that he can truly inhabit his characters – young, old, male, female, 19th-century or contemporary – which is why it's a shame that in Terms of Endearment none of them are likeable (with the exception of Rosie, though I hated that she so easily allows herself to become a doormat). She keeps Larry McMurtry's miscalculated whirligig spinning through sheer force of will. Aurora grates on the reader for the longest time, until the penny drops about halfway through the book that everyone else is just as wretched, self-centred, tawdry, obnoxious and arrogant as she is, and then you begin to enjoy her ruthless dismissals of them. 6), the novel is oriented around the overbearing, outspoken Aurora and her relationship with her adult daughter Emma and a circle of rather pathetic male suitors. Described in the author's somewhat defensive preface – never a good sign – as a 'social comedy' (pg. Trust Aurora Greenway, who speaks the line quoted above, to cut the slightly silly and superfluous Terms of Endearment to its core. "Relations on this block are certainly getting soap-opera-ish." (pg.
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