Some Can Whistle was published by Simon & Schuster in 1989. Danny Deck is a television writer who created a hit sitcom called Al and Sal, made a fortune, and retreated to a vast ranch in the Texas hills where he lives alone with his books, his swimming pool, and his terminal writer’s block. He has not written anything in years. He has not seen his daughter, T.R., since she was a baby — her mother took her and vanished, and Danny, who was young, selfish, and terrified of responsibility, did not pursue them.
T.R. calls out of the blue. She is in her twenties, lives in a chaotic Houston household with her children, various boyfriends, and an extended network of friends and dependents. She is loud, profane, generous, violent, sexually uninhibited, and utterly without pretension. She is everything Danny is not, and her arrival at his ranch — with children, friends, and assorted hangers-on in tow — detonates his carefully arranged solitude.
The novel’s first half is comedy — Danny’s attempt to accommodate T.R.’s chaotic energy, his bewildered encounters with her Houston world, his growing love for the grandchildren he never knew he had. The second half turns dark. T.R.’s world is genuinely dangerous — the men she associates with are violent, and the Houston underclass that McMurtry depicts with unsentimental precision is a world where arguments end in shootings and lives are derailed by drugs, poverty, and bad luck.
The ending is devastating and abrupt — McMurtry refuses to prepare the reader, and the shock is deliberate. Danny is left with the knowledge that love, once recovered, can be lost again, and that the comfort of isolation is purchased at the price of everything that makes life worth living.
Collecting Some Can Whistle
First edition (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1989): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$40
- Very good: $8–$20
- Signed: $40–$100