The Evening Star was published by Simon & Schuster in 1992. Aurora Greenway is now in her seventies. Emma is dead, and Aurora has taken on the raising of Emma’s three children: Tommy, Teddy, and Melanie. The children are now teenagers and young adults, and they are a mess. Tommy is in prison. Teddy is adrift. Melanie is angry. Aurora, who managed Emma’s life with such confident authority, discovers that grandchildren — especially grandchildren shaped by their mother’s death and their father’s inadequacy — do not respond to the same techniques.
McMurtry’s Houston has changed too. The oil boom of the 1970s is over, and the city that Aurora once dominated socially has moved on. Her suitors are older, less distinguished, and less amusing. The General, the most persistent of her admirers from the first novel, is dead. Aurora’s new companion is Jerry Bruckner, her psychiatrist — a relationship that would be ethically disastrous in any other context but that McMurtry renders as one of the few genuine human connections in a novel filled with loneliness.
The novel lacks the first book’s emotional trajectory — there is no equivalent of Emma’s death to give it shape — and reviewers were divided. But McMurtry’s portrait of aging is honest and unsparing. Aurora’s body betrays her, her memory falters, her authority erodes, and the people she tries to help resent her interference. The comedy is still there — Aurora’s one-liners retain their sting — but it is comedy shot through with awareness of mortality.
Collecting The Evening Star
First edition (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1992): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$35
- Very good: $8–$20
- Signed: $30–$75