Book Reviews
There is something very winning about Larry McMurtry's latest novel, Terms of Endearment something that makes one keep reading along despite the book's many obvious faults. Partly, I suppose, it's simply trust in Mr. McMurtry...[who] has never been less than winning. Partly, it's the star of the story, Aurora Greenway.... The novel can't seem to make up its mind what it wants to be....It starts off a drawing-room farce.... At other times it veers into pure sensibility.... and concludes with the slightly lugubrious story of [Aurora's] daughter's marital misadventures and eventual death from cancer.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt - New York Times
McMurtry [is] trying his hand at what seems, for most of the book's length, to be a kind of comedy of manners centered upon a well-to-do widow of forty-nine.... Respecting McMurtry's earlier achievements, one would like to think that the author is taking large risks.... But the evidence does not support such a wish. Terms of Endearment remains an odd, misshapen, surprisingly amateurish novel composed of disparate parts that never cohere.
Robert Towers - New York Times Book Review