THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 11, 1994 TAG: 9409090621
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY ANN G. SJOERDSMA
LENGTH: Medium: 86 lines
PRETTY BOY FLOYD
A Novel
LARRY McMURTRY AND DIANA OSSANA
Simon & Schuster. 444 pp. $24.
A cross between Huckleberry Finn and Jesse James, and way out of Dillinger's league, Larry McMurtry's Charles Arthur ``Pretty Boy'' Floyd is a gentleman bandit whose big dreams of wealth and luxury stripped him of his rural innocence and set him on a path of self-destruction.
If only this dumb, witless, selfish and petty character, for whom McMurtry and his co-author Diana Ossana insist upon having great sympathy, had some of the charm that they claim. Then their lightly comic novel about the Depression-era outlaw, steeped in the aimless but often clever dialogue of bored ordinary Americans, might have more appeal. Instead, McMurtry and Ossana, who first co-wrote a ``Pretty Boy Floyd'' screenplay, tell an uninspired tale about a dull Oklahoma farm boy who loved catfish dinners, fancy threads, long-legged women and his Mamie's flapjacks, and couldn't stop robbing banks.
The fingerprints of McMurtry (Lonesome Dove, The Streets of Laredo) are all over this curious book, although the authors claim a collaboration - he wrote five pages per day, which she then fleshed out to 10. McMurtry romanticizes Floyd, and it is impossible to separate fact from fiction. Suffice it to say that in 1925, 21-year-old Charley Floyd from Akins, Okla., ineptly held up a Kroger Bakery armored truck in St. Louis and was apprehended within a week. (The new gabardine suit and blue Studebaker were a mite conspicuous.) Nine years later Floyd was mowed down on an Oklahoma hillside, another Public Enemy No. 1 killed by J. Edgar Hoover's top G-man, Melvin Purvis.
Between 1925 and '34, Floyd crisscrossed the heartland, knocking off banks whenever he ran short of cash and killing only in self-defense. Folks not much caring for banks during the Depression, he became something of a hero a la Robin Hood.
Floyd's one attempt to go straight, after a four-year stint in the Missouri state pen, was cut short by Colorado and Texas law enforcers who, not liking his looks, picked him up for loitering.
His teenage wife, Ruby, having left him for a baker while he was in prison, Floyd didn't have much to live for, except flapjacks, whoring and drinking. Thus, an outlaw was born.
In classic McMurtry fashion, colorful characters spill out of Pretty Boy Floyd, some of them mere moments on a page, others dependably reappearing, moving the story along. As usual, he has lots of sassy women, whores with hearts of gold and steel-trap minds, and just as many incompetent, greedy men. Many characters seem cartoonish, like Willie ``Turnip Breath'' Locust, who eats turnips day and night; reporter Viv Brown, who, straight out of ``The Front Page,'' gets an exclusive interview with Floyd and his partner George Birdwell; and Hoover himself, a blustery buffoon. Still others, like Beulah Baird, the moll who gave Floyd his nickname, just grate and grate and grate. .
Trademark ``McMurtryisms'' of everyday, comical social intercourse are also liberally sprinkled throughout: A sheriff bluntly tells two lawmen who allowed Floyd to escape, ``You boys don't have the firewood to fuel much thinking.''; and an old woman informs her husband, who admires the deceased Birdwell's Stetson, ``Yeah, and you can hope all your next life, too. That hat's beyond you, Dad.''
Pretty Boy Floyd is unquestionably a lark.
Its fast pace and nonstop boyish antics notwithstanding, the novel lacks the relevance that distinguished McMurtry's The Last Picture Show and Lonesome Dove: Ordinary folks with ordinary hardships don't scale mythic heights without a lot of effort. There may well be an American tragedy in the story of Pretty Boy Floyd, but, if so, McMurtry and Ossana don't tell it. MEMO: Ann G. Sjoerdsma is book editor for The Virginian-Pilot and The
Ledger-Star. ILLUSTRATION: Jacket design by WENDELL MINOR
Jacket painting by GRANT WOOD
Graphic
EXCERPT
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by CNB