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The Desert Rose by Larry McMurtry (review)
- Western American Literature
- The Western Literature Association
- Volume 20, Number 2, Summer 1985
- pp. 167-168
- 10.1353/wal.1985.0092
- Review
- Additional Information
Reviews The Desert Rose. By Larry McMurtry. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983. 254 pages, $14.95.) I suppose it’s because I live in Las Vegas that I was asked to review this novel. This is unfortunate. While I appreciate novels that are about real people in a real place, I don’t feel that all novels have to be. But part of the problem with this novel is that it purports to be about a real place, Las Vegas in 1983, and about real people, a showgirl and her teenage daughter. The research the author did to establish his setting was minimal to say the least. There are a multitude of geographical, economic, and other factual errors that could spoil the book for anyone really familiar with the city and its inhabitants. If the story were set in Las Vegas thirty or so years ago, much of it might have made sense. But the author goes to gratuitous lengths to establish the 1983 date. While minor things, like the price of a pay phone in Nevada or what might be purchased where, might be overlooked, some of the assumptions, such as how much a showgirl is paid, are essential to the story itself, and the errors, therefore, while possibly contributing to an out sider’s fantasies about Las Vegas, actually distort a picture of the real place. Personally, I’d be willing to overlook these errorsif the story itself worked. But it does not. Briefly, it is the tale of thirty-nine-year-old Harmony and her daughter, sixteen-year-old Pepper, both of whom seem to have I.Q.’s some where around eighty-five. If these women had a bit more personality, depth, or complexity, they might be distant cousins of Dorothy Parker’s Big Blond or maybe My Friend Irma. As it is, they are at best clinically pitiful (and obsolete fictional types?). The story is presented in alternating scenes from the point of view of either the mother or daughter. Both women think in the same phraseology and vocabulary, and incidentally, both think in a kind of Southern California dialect. While we don’t get a Valley Girl’s “Gross me out” or “Gag me with a spoon,” we do get “sort of totally” and (really jarring) “Jap” for “Japa nese,” something I’ve heard in Southern California but never, in twenty-five years, in Las Vegas. The fundamental technical problem with the novel is this presentation through the eyes and voices of two women of limited intelligence. The use of an outside narrator might perhaps have made it an amusing fantasy, and, indeed, McMurtry’s almost patronizing tone does come through, but all in all, the lives of these women as told by them are anything but amusing. 168 Western American Literature Harmony lives barely above the poverty level on the edge of the Las Vegas desert. She was married to a man who left her, but neither has bothered to get a divorce. Her daughter goes to high school, smokes marijuana, and has sex with her boyfriend solely because he is good-looking and has a nice car. Through him she is introduced to a wealthy, middle-aged voyeur, who likes to photograph athletic high school boys in the nude and good-looking young girls in antique underwear. The voyeur proposes marriage, Pepper accepts, but is immediately “discovered” in her dancing class and offered the lead in the Lido de Paris show at the Stardust Hotel, where her mother works. Pepper decides to marry the voyeur and accept the job, but Harmony is fired on her thirty-ninth birthday because “it wouldn’t look right” having a mother and daughter working in the same show. Harmony’s husband decides he wants her back, and she leaves to join him in Reno (on a southbound bus!). This could have been a fun bit of fluff. But it isn’t. The characters are pitiful but empty. Their lives are out ofcontrol forno particular reason except their own shallowness and lack of intelligence. But worst of all, they are dull. Usually if people like that start to tell you their stories in a bar, some...