Movie-Cute

By Paul Gray

SOME CAN WHISTLE

by Larry McMurtry

Simon & Schuster

348 pages; $19.95

Some authors write good novels, and others write novels that get made into good movies. Larry McMurtry has managed to do both, and at the same time. His highly praised fiction includes several titles -- The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment -- that are probably more familiar to filmgoers than to readers. And Lonesome Dove, for which he was awarded the 1986 Pulitzer Prize, won huge ratings last winter as a TV mini-series.

A similar sort of success may await Some Can Whistle, McMurtry's 13th novel. If so, that will be a redemption of sorts for an uncharacteristical ly spotty performance between hard covers. Plot has given way to concocted situations, conversation displaced by laugh-track dialogue. Everything and everyone in the tale reeks of Hollywood, particularly the narrator.

Danny Deck, the hero of McMurtry's earlier novel All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers, has earned more than $300 million as the writer-producer of a TV sitcom called Al and Sal. Retired at age 51 in the mansion he has built on an isolated hill in Texas, he dreams of writing a novel and keeps in touch by telephone with a network of glamorous actresses scattered about the globe. One morning he receives a call and hears an unfamiliar female voice: "Mr. Deck, are you my stinkin' Daddy?"

This turns out to be T.R. (Tyler Rose), the only child of Deck's only marriage. She has read in Parade magazine that he is "the richest writer in the world" and has decided to lay some expensive guilt on him for 22 years of neglect. He -- as hapless as any sitcom daddy -- rushes off to rescue her from her low-rent life in Houston. When he gets there, he finds that his daughter is a foul-mouthed, dope-smoking mother of two small children, both of whose fathers are in prison.

Improbably, Deck finds his daughter enchanting. T.R. is movie-cute, meaning that an accomplished actress might make her hideously egocentric behavior appealing to an audience that knew it would all be over in two hours. Readers, facing a longer haul, may be excused for waiting for the film.