Somebody's Darling employs some of the conventions of aesthetic realism and employs them well; the characters are rounded and believable and the story line involving….

A complex narration, similar to that of The Sound and the Fury, interestingly complicates plot and characters by showing them through overlapping and frequently contradictory lenses. (p. 181)

McMurtry's is to my mind the most mature of several recent novels by men that consider the current status of women in American society, yet it is bound to come under criticism from a certain quarter. Why make [the protagonist] Jill Peel a film director with only modest talent? Why make her fall in love with cruel men? Why make her incapable of sticking up for herself? I think McMurtry would here invoke his realist aesthetic: he can only paint what he sees and the world as he sees it unfortunately provides more material to create a Jill Peel than, say, "the woman warrior" of Maxine Hong Kingston's fascinating book of that title.

But, putting sociology to the side, realism is no excuse for artistic dullness. An interesting character is one thing, an effective narrator something else entirely. All of the book's narrators are unreliable, but the men manage to be authoritative even when they lack any credentials other than the will to impose their voices upon the world. Jill lacks that will. She can't quite cut it as a director, and she can't cut it as a narrator. Her material resists her. When she sympathizes with [movie queen] Sherry Solare, who kills her own son and steals Jill's man, she thereby denies herself an exploration of a deeply evil character. [Her close friend] Joe Percy's narration may, through his self-absorption, cut him off from the present tense of the novel, but nostalgia belongs to a powerful literary tradition which Percy can conjure easily and effectively. Owen [Jill's unsavory lover] does hide behind cynicism, but in the world of Somebody's Darling it is hard to locate the tender feelings he misses out on. In the voice of a different narrator than Jill Peel, or perhaps in a book by a different novelist …, the evil of a Sherry Solare could achieve tangible and fearsome proportions…. But Somebody's Darling is not that kind of book and McMurtry not that kind of writer. Thus what we are left with is a novel whose narration partially falters due to the author's strict adherence to aesthetic realism. (pp. 181-82)