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In his new memoir, PARADISE, Pulitzer Prize-winner, screenwriter and bookstore-owner
Larry McMurtry trades the highways and byways of the American West for the blue highway of
the Pacific Ocean. PARADISE, the third of his memoirs, contrasts the marriage and
hard-scrabble life of his parents in West Texas to life in the lush "paradise"
of Tahiti as well as pointing out the similarities between Native American reservation
life and that of these indigenous people so many thousands of miles away. McMurtry's prose
is reflective and full of emotion; while he is floating from island to island adrift in a
faraway sea, his mother is also "at sea," at home in Texas, dying slowly and
painfully. This latest book of McMurtry's is, to say the least, quite different from his
LONESOME DOVE saga.
The cover of the memoir is sly and deceptive; my family was certain I was reading a
"dirty" book. A full length, bold and vibrant Gauguin commands the reader's
attention. This painting is of a beautiful and quite nude young Tahitian woman who appears
startled, as if suddenly realizing she is being watched, and tries to cover her nakedness
with a handkerchief. As PARADISE unfolds, McMurtry goes into great detail about the
painting, its subject, and the artist. For instance, the reader learns that Gauguin left
his Danish wife and their five children before going to Tahiti to paint. The subject of
the painting? Gauguin's 13-year-old mistress Teha'amana. Understanding the painting and
the artist are central to understanding McMurtry and his peregrinations.
While the jacket copy states that the book is both "an inviting travel book and an
insightful reflection on his parents' marriage…," I would not term it a travel
book at all. It is more a journal of a long, sometimes tedious, voyage on a freighter.
McMurtry has signed aboard this floating tin can in hopes of glimpsing the
"real" life in the islands --- as have a slew of European tourists, making any
forays into the underside of native life nearly impossible. Much of the book takes place
while the freighter is at sea, with McMurtry at his laconically hilarious best, describing
the tensions between the crew of the ship and their white, Western passengers as well as
the minutia of these tourists' daily habits. The shipboard routine is broken only by
occasional stops at remote islands for the crew to load and unload staples and for the
tourists on board to stock up on native crafts.
McMurtry's insights into his parents' dysfunctional marriage, however, keep the reader's
attention. Early on McMurtry recounts a well-intentioned surprise gone awry. He had
planned a special event for his parents 42nd wedding anniversary, buying them airplane
tickets from Texas to visit him in Washington, DC. It was one of only three trips the
couple took in all their years together. The night before the flight, McMurtry's parents
quarreled over an inconsequential detail, and although they did not cancel the trip, the
day in Washington was full of fuming, silent treatments, passive aggressive hostility and
was generally awful for anyone involved. The author reveals many pages later that this was
only a culmination of many conflicts between his parents. His father and mother once made
an attempt to address their sham of a marriage, making an appointment with a marriage
counselor, but the appointment was canceled due to the fear that people in their tiny town
might talk.
PARADISE is a quick read (only about 160 pages) and yet one that raises questions in every
reader about the reality of his/her parents' marriages and lives. What is PARADISE anyway?
Where is it? When will we reach eternal happiness? Perhaps none of us realize that we may
be already living there.
--- Reviewed by Carolyn Branch Leonard
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