SOURCE: "Books of the Times: McMurtry's Sequel to Terms of Endearment," in New York Times, May 12, 1992.

In the following review of The Evening Star, noted critic Kakutani states that while McMurtry's writing is not always balanced, he is skilled enough to overcome the novel's weaknesses and tell an entertaining story.

As Aurora Greenway thinks about her granddaughter, Melanie, leaving Texas for a new life in California, she feels her own spirits sink. "All around them," she thinks, "was evidence of what she knew in her own heart: that life was nothing but a matter of innumerable comings and goings, separations and separateness, of departures from which there might be no certain return." In short, "People left, they died, they didn't come back."

These melancholy thoughts pretty much sum up the dominant mood, not to mention the plot, of The Evening Star, Larry McMurtry's sequel to his 1975 novel, Terms...