The news came that writer Charles Portis has died at the age of 86. It had not even occurred to me that he was still alive until a few weeks ago when some tidbit came across Twitter or something or other.
Portis is known mostly for True Grit, and wrote a few other novels. I’ve read most of them – quirky, smart, deeply observant and very funny.
Here’s what I wrote about Dogs of the South. (original post here)
I’m a Portis fan, although he definitely wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea. You probably know him as the author of True Grit – I’ve also read Norwood and Gringos.
He’s a very funny writer, an observer of bizarre, telling details that reveal the truth about a person whether they know it or not. His way into a story is always through a narrative voice – if you’ve read True Grit you know that what makes it a fascinating novel is not so much the story – teenage girl hires bounty-hunter to help her find her father’s murderer – but the fact that it’s told in the first person by the girl as a grown woman in a very distinctive, formal true-believing Protestant Christian voice.
Dog of the South is a ragged escapade, the story of Ray Midge, young man traveling from Arkansas to Belize (then still called British Honduras) to fetch his wife, who’s run off with another fellow. He’s sure they’ve gone to Belize because he knows the other fellow’s father has a farm there. On the way, he meets various characters, including Dr. Symes, the older-middle-aged son of a female preacher with a ministry in Belize City, who hitches a ride (to Belize City to settle a property dispute with his mother) with Ray in San Miguel de Allende because his bus, painted with the monikker Dog of the South, has broken down.
Well, yes. And there’s more. It’s not a long book, and definitely worth the three hours or so I spent with these characters. I felt the middle sagged a bit, but I think that’s because for a time, Portis lost his grip on Midge’s narrative voice – but it comes roaring back in the end. I also like Portis’ books because he spends so much time in Mexico and Central America – some parts I’ve never visited, but many I have – Merida, Belize, Mexico City, and so on.
Anyway, here’s a taste of what I enjoy about Portis. Just spot-on descriptions.
But Jack was a good-natured fellow and I admired him for being a man of action. I was 
uneasy when I first met him. He struck me as one of those country birds who, one second after meeting you, will start telling of bestial escapade 
involving violence or sex or both, or who might in the same chatty way want to to talk about Christ’s Kingdom on Earth. It can go either way with these fellows and you need to be ready.
***
He thought it was pretty good but it was old stuff to me, being compared to a rat. In fact, I look more like a predatory bird than a rat but any person with small sharp features that are bunched in the center of his face can expect to be called a rat about three times a year.
***
(In San Miguel de Allende)
Hippies interfered with my work by stopping me and asking me the time. Why did they care? And if so, why didn’t they have watches? The watch factories were humming day and night in Tokyo and Geneva and Little Rock so that everyone might have a cheap watch, but not one of these hippies had a watch. Maybe the winding put them off. Or maybe it was all mockery of me and my coat and tie. The same hippies seemed to be stopping me again and again, though I couldn’t be sure.
Charles Portis’ Norwood, is at the Internet Archive. It was Portis’ first novel – he’s the author of True Grit, which is excellent and worth your time even if you’ve seen the movie – or both movies. Norwood is a dark, wry slice of life that doesn’t have a deep message, but is all about the observation of the life of a certain way of mid-century southern life (with a sojourn in New York City). It’s an interesting companion to Percy and O’Connor on that account. Norwood is an ex-marine who goes home to Arkansas to tend to his vaguely disabled sister, ends up agreeing to drive a couple of cars up to New York for a blustery, shady operator of some sort, abandons the cars, ends up in New York City anyway for a bit, meets a girl on the way back on the bus, along with a British midget…and…well, there you go. I enjoyed it very much – Portis has a gift for dialogue and a fascinating writing style that skips through events, hones on the essential, and still manages to paint a complete picture. There was a film adaptation of this novel, starring Glen Campbell, I suppose because he was in True Grit, but I can’t even imagine how ridiculous it must be.
And then, a quote from Gringos that I’d highlighted once in a previous post:
Old Suarez was there waiting in the cambio line, the exchange line, a revolutionary in coat and tie and black felt hat. He was all in black, watchful, on the lookout for little signs of disrespect to his person. A big American woman had sat down on him once. She hadn’t seen him on the park bench. Today he was lecturing. The leathery woman in front of him was from Winnipeg. She painted big brown landscapes. Suarez didn’t think much of Canadians either and he was setting her straight on a few things. Their nation was illegitimate. Their sovereignty had been handed to them on a platter, an outright gift, instead of having been properly won through force of arms. The birth throes had to be violent. There had to be blood.
Charlotte was Both 