I’ve read a ton over the past week – mostly so I could get my brain attuned for Literature “class” for the next month or so. I’ll run over that in the next post. But first: Gringos.
I’d read it before – seven years ago, right after one of our Mexico trips. Seven years is a long time, so I don’t feel too bad that it was almost all new to me.
If Flannery couldn’t remember much, then I might be okay.
Anyway. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. If you like wry humor, insightful characterization and craziness, try Charles Portis. Not from me, but from another writer:
Casting about for ways to account for the effect of his words on the page, I asked some eminent and accomplished Portisians to explain what they found so compelling about his writing. Roy Blount Jr., a master of humor that relies on voice rather than punch lines, once wrote, “The only adequate response to a Charles Portis novel is to jump in the air, do a flip, and wind up on your feet, like Cheetah the chimp in the Tarzan movies when intensely pleased.”1 Blount’s email exchange with me centered on the narrow but crucial angle of distinction between Portis’s characters and narrating voice. “Not only do the characters take themselves seriously, but so does the author take them,” he wrote. “So how can they be so funny? There must be some other consciousness behind the author. Maybe the reader is looking over the author’s shoulder as he looks … No, that can’t be it. Worth considering: Portis told me how much he loved Borges.”
I will say that I’m currently in the midst of my last unread Portis, Masters of Atlantis, and it’s probably his least good work. If that makes sense. It’s of a different style than the other books – less about people, who, as exaggerated as they may be, are still real in some sense – than a general satire of cultism and various aspects of 20th century life. It’s entertaining, but without the depth you usually find in Portis.
Anyway, Gringos.
Although much of the action takes place in an area we didn’t see – around Palenque – the parts that occurred in Merida and other spots in the Yucatan were a lot more vivid to me having been there. It was one of those books that I’m going to have to reread, since I entered into it thinking it was going to be one thing – sort of a madcap expat adventure – and ended up being something slightly different – a melancholy expat adventure.
From another blogger’s summary:
Gringos is a deceptively taut and moving novel about an American in Mexico, Jimmy Burns, who used to traffic in looted pre-Columbian artifacts. It begins:
Christmas again in Yucatán. Another year gone by and I was still scratching around this limestone peninsula. I woke at eight, late for me, wondering where I might find something to eat. Once again there had been no scramble among the hostesses of Mérida to see who could get me for Christmas dinner. Would the Astro Café be open? The Cocina Económica? The Express? I couldn’t remember from one holiday to the next about these things. A wasp, I saw, was building a nest under my window sill. It was a gray blossom on a stem. Go off for a few days and nature starts creeping back into your little clearing.
Though I have read that opening paragraph dozens of times, the way the former tomb raider’s unhurried musing on local dining options leads to a bolt of insight into the entropic temporariness of civilization still gets me every time. Revelation turns out to have been sneaking up on both narrator and reader from the start, its dire grandiosity interwoven with easygoing self-deprecation, a trademark Portis effect.
Essentially: the narrator is a fellow who makes a living in Mexico any way he can, from digging up and selling artifacts, to driving a Texas couple’s RV back to the States, to finding and getting rewards for runaways. The plot of Gringos involves, in no particular order: the attempt to find a missing aliens-made-the-pyramids crackpot, an End Times gathering of hippies and criminals at a Mayan site, the health dramas of various ex-pat archaeologists and entrepreneurs, and the bemused, canny, capitalizing reaction of the locals to all these crazy people.
What I am always looking for in what I read is the sharp, focused observation. Portis gives plenty of them:
Reflecting on the alien-researchers discourse: A millimeter off, either way, and you were a fool. It was the scorn of one crank for another crank.
On a space in a house: …a good room to carry out some quiet mad enterprise.
A Mormon archaeologists hosts the scrappy searchers at his dig site: After the meal, witha playful wink, he said he was sorry but he had no ‘highballs’ to offer us. ‘Gentiles’ of our type, he knew, just barely made it from one drink to the next.
Random:
In the Anthropology Club, as I understood it, you were permitted, if not required, to despise only one thing, and that was your own culture, that of the West. Otherwise, you couldn’t prefer one thing over another.
…
My neighbors, Chuck and Diane, stopped to speak. That wasn’t quite their names, but some names you can’t take in. They could have spelled out their names for me every day for six days running and on Sunday morning I would have drawn a blank again.
..
I had never known anyone so crazy that he couldn’t understand a 12-gauge shotgun.
..
My mother didn’t approve of zoos. She took things as they came, and it was always startling when she expressed some strong opinion like that.
..
Try to save a few pesos on your rent and you end up beating up pit vipers.
..
On the question of the End Times. All the interested and the experts are trying to figure out why the Doomsday cult has gathered now. They’re all disagreeing, but they find great satisfaction in the process:
Still — Doomsday is at hand. The prophecy never fails to pull you up short. You stop a bit before going on. No one knows and so anyone might hit on it.
On the hippies and drifters who have gathered:
They simply wanted to be on stage for the dramatic finish. It must all wind down with them and nobody else. The thought of the world going on and on without them, much as usual, and they forgotten, was unbearable.
It seems to me you must let a haunted man make his report.
Charlotte was Both 