Somebody's Darling has an interesting story to tell: Hollywood has chosen Jill Peel, a shy, witty, work-obsessed animator and cinematic technician, to be America's first woman film director. Her initial effort, Womanly Ways, is successful, so successful that it sends her on to the New York Film Festival, an Oscar, and the direction of a second film, this one a Western, to be shot on location in Texas. Jill's success, however, proves insistent; it places her in the confidence of a dying mogul; it ensnares her in a brutal love affair. It sets her at odds with a vengeful, female superstar and enforces a nearly disasterous distance between her and her oldest friends. At 37, Jill Peel must struggle to reclaim herself from Hollywood's entangling system of rewards and punishments, and from the contradictory demands of love, work, friendship and fame.

McMurtry has divided Somebody's Darling among first-person narrators, a design that necessarily tests his technique as a storyteller. There are three sections, three different points of view. Jill's protector, Fitzgeraldesque adviser, and closest friend, Joe Percy, speaks first. The second section is recounted by Owen Oarson, ambitious, violent and emotionally numb, the lover whom Jill acquires during her stay in New York City. And Jill herself tells the last part of her story.

Since self-disclosure is the method of the novel, Somebody's Darling opens appropriately, in mid-conversation…. McMurtry issues an invitation to eavesdrop which, if we accept it, ought to draw us into the nature of his characters and set us within the bounded and carefully crafted world of the good novel. (pp. 121-22)

Through several of his novels now, Larry McMurtry has been charting a fictional world, extending its boundaries, populating it with recurrent characters…. The geography of this world is the author's own: humid Houston, intellectual Austin, Hollywood's hills and movie-lots, an outsider's-become-insider's New York. McMurtry has tenanted this landscape with Texans and Californians, with film people and book people, with eccentrics and hustlers, with artists and movie technicians, housewives and academics. When a fictional world accretes in this way, novel by novel, it allows its author time to cast over his landscape form meaning, pattern, value. There is a promise made … that as the author slowly structures his fictional world, he will invest its architecture with a significant interpretation of inner and outer life….

Somebody's Darling hints at themes that McMurtry has suggested previously in earlier novels: the terror underlying all relationships between men and women; the paradoxical isolation that shadows a woman's growing strength; the difficulty of saving one's soul in a culture as nourishing as a greasy hamburger, as anonymously formed and fatally sterile as a styrofoam cup. Relentlessly pursued by a "how" or a "why," any of these themes would become substantial, an "important question," the material of a good novel. But once again, as in his previous fiction, McMurtry refuses to track down the game he has startled from the bushes. And so, despite Joe Percy's advocacy of "loyalty," of the persistence essential to craft, the hunt is lost. "Important questions" slip off into the woods while McMurtry entertains us with easy sentiment and instant laughs.

The dialogue of Somebody's Darling is consistently clever; but it is also uniformly clever and, therefore, finally, wearyingly clever. The three narrators of the novel, in fact the entire populace of McMurtry's world, speak a California variant of American Wiseass…. Joe, debonair and death-haunted; Jill, desperate and struggling; Owen, tightlipped and deliberate, all sound alike. They are facelessly funny, as interchangeably voluble as the writers of Johnny Carson's monologues.

Since the joyful and the suffering, the stupid and the sensitive all express their feelings casually in one-liners, no character in Somebody's Darling articulates an independent inner life. Moods remain causal unknowns, motives are as remote and unsummonable as ghosts at noon. Somehow or other, people simply feel this way today, that way tomorrow…. Conceivably the man with the map might be McMurtry himself, were he to cease sketching funny lines long enough to create fully dimensional portraits. He does not lack observational talent. But in spite of his awareness that craftsmanship requires patience, McMurtry remains obsessed by pace. He continues to be a quick-sketch artist who insists upon completing every picture within the moment.

As a result his novel trades away substance for speed, a costly bargain. "Important questions" give way to an easy existential shrug. Life, we learn, is not as good as the movies; or, as one character succinctly sums it up, "life is a mess.'" If McMurtry had solidly invested his world with necessity, then such a conclusion might ring true…. But Larry McMurtry's world is not intractible, complex and baffling; it is simple, clever, and timed for a laugh. (pp. 122-23)

He is an extremely talented writer, funny, skillful, observant. But he must constantly arrive, and so he is unable to journey. Although McMurtry sets Somebody's Darling on the road to Wessex, he cannot steer it to its destination, because he insists on stopping off for a snack at every Dairy Queen along the highway. (p. 123)