Book Review : Something to Pick Up When You’re Feeling Down ...

Texas Noon by Leonard Sanders (Delacorte Press: $18.95; 452 pages).

In this coming symphony of mixed metaphors, it might be logically argued that there are absolutely no bad books--not even any “average” books; that every novel is like a plain little secretary with glasses, typing away in obscurity, and that all it takes is the love of a good reader to turn those horn rims into bright-blue contact lenses, to pull the wispy, untended hair out of its school-teacherly bun, and fluff it up into a movie-star perm. Perhaps it’s the other way around: No book can be “good” until a reader falls in love with it.

As in any dating situation, the trick is for reader and book to get on the same wavelength. I hope that Leonard Sanders won’t take it amiss when I say it might be best if you read “Texas Noon” in a slightly weakened condition, when you’re only running at about 80%--when your objections about whether or not this work could be construed as “original material,” or why these characters change their personalities at the drop of a chapter heading might be considerably muted.

Novelistic Dance Hall

Read this book when all your petty caveats are put to rest by some pesky virus that has got you flat on your back and you don’t want anything to be original: You just want to be waltzed around the novelistic dance hall by some burly bozo who at least knows what he wants to do, and you follow wimpily along, because it’s 3 in the afternoon, the sun is out, your nose is running and there’s nothing else to do but be led through the paces of this plot.

“Texas Noon” makes a virtue of cliche. We’ve got an independent oil company in these pages! The characters--all in one tempestuous family--live in Ft. Worth. (Leonard Sanders is so ingenuous about all of this! You’d think he’d never even lived in the United States of America, where, for the last decade, two of our most popular television series have been David Jacob’s “Dallas” where a tempestuous family lives just a stone’s throw from Ft. Worth, and “Dynasty,” where yet another tempestuous family struggles to wrest power from each other’s independent oil company. Sanders even presents a character named Crystelle, though the spelling of her name and her disposition differ greatly from Krystle in Richard and Esther Shapiro’s own decadent media confection.)

“The simple things are the best,” some people say. Sanders keeps “Texas Noon” simple. Joanna Spurlock has just inherited Spurlock Oil. Because her husband, Brod (who murdered somebody in Volume 1) has died. Joanna--in the 1950s--takes over Spurlock Oil. Can she do it? Yes, because she learns to pretend to defer to her male staff, and though those guys are so stupid she has them believing they’re making the decisions. Joanna has two sons. (Well, the plot is tried and true--all the way back to Jenesis. If something works, why fix it?) Her older son, Weldon, is brash and money-grubbing. Her younger son, Kelly, is quiet and disturbed. Weldon gets in a scrape and is sent off to military school. Kelly joins the Texas Boys Choir getting culture and a backbone. Crystelle comes back to Ft. Worth with evidence that Brod, her brother, killed that man back in Volume 1. Consternation!

Who Will Wrest Control?

Will the evil Crystelle be able to wrest control of Spurlock Oil from the virtuous and hard-working Joanna? What do you think, gentle reader? And when Weldon comes home as a brash and money-grubbing grown-up and teams up with the scholarly but still lonely Kelly, what do you think will happen then? Will they wrest control from Joanna? If so, at what cost?

“Texas Noon” is less an adventure than a soft old song--something like “Red River Valley” or “My Old Kentucky Home.” Read it in the afternoon, keep your cough syrup beside you. Watch the patterns that the leaves on the trees outside your window make on the pages of your book. Let Sanders waltz you around the floor until you feel better--tunelessly crooning plot turns in your ear in such a soothing tone that in his voice, a grisly murder seems as calm and orderly as a hand-hooked throw rug. (Just don’t read “Texas Noon” when you’re feeling chipper, critical and generally on top of things. That would be an injustice, both to the author--and to you.)