The ultimate Portis: for the first time in one collector's volume, the complete fiction and collected nonfiction of the author of True Grit Summer reading recommendation in THE WASHINGTON POST, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, and THE MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL "Charles Portis is one of the great pure pleasures available in American literature." --Ron Rosenbaum "Like Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Thomas Berger's Little Big Man , Charles Portis's True Grit captures the na???ve elegance of the American voice." - ...
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The ultimate Portis: for the first time in one collector's volume, the complete fiction and collected nonfiction of the author of True Grit Summer reading recommendation in THE WASHINGTON POST, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, and THE MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL "Charles Portis is one of the great pure pleasures available in American literature." --Ron Rosenbaum "Like Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Thomas Berger's Little Big Man , Charles Portis's True Grit captures the na???ve elegance of the American voice." --Jonathan Lethem "No living Southern writer captures the spoken idioms of the South as artfully as Portis does." --Donna Tartt "His fiction is the funniest I know." --Roy Blount, Jr. Twice adapted as a film, first in a version starring John Wayne and then by the Coen Brothers, True Grit is a wonder of novelistic perfection, told in the unforgettable voice of 14-year-old Mattie Ross as she sets out to avenge her murdered father in a quest that brings her out of her native Arkansas and into the wilds of the Choctaw Nation of the 1870s. One of the great literary Westerns, it is also a novel that has invited comparison with The Wizard of Oz , Alice in Wonderland , and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . Portis's deadpan debut novel Norwood (1966) is, like True Grit , the story of a quest, though here the stakes are far lower: an auto mechanic from Texas embarks on a madcap journey to New York City to try and recover $70 owed to him from an Army buddy. A book that according to Roy Blount Jr. "no one should die without having read," The Dog of the South (1979) is yet a third saga of pursuit, this time all the way to Central America. Ray Midge is on the road looking for the man who has run off with his car (and of somewhat less interest to him, his wife.) Masters of Atlantis (1985) conjures the fictional cult of Gnomonism and takes an uproarious plunge into the dark heart of conspiratorial thinking and schismatic in-fighting. Gringos (1991), set in Mexico, follows an expatriate ex-Marine in his search to find a UFO hunter gone missing in the Yucatan, amid a supporting cast of archaeologists, drug-addled hippie millenarians, and the son of the "bravest dog in all Mexico." A generous gathering of the nonfiction reveals Portis's skills as a reporter, above all in his coverage of the Civil Rights Movement; his appreciation of Arkansas history and landscape, as in "The Forgotten River"; and his poignancy as a family memoirist, on display in his recollection "Combinations of Jacksons."
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Every Fourth of July, I try to review a book appropriate to the themes of the day. For this difficult year, 2024, I picked this Library of America volume of the Collected Works of Charles Portis published last year. Portis (1933 -- 2000) was a Southern writer, born and raised in Arkansas. He earned a degree in journalism and worked as a reporter in New York City and London. In 1965, he returned to Arkansas where he lived the rest of his life and wrote his five novels. Portis shunned publicity and lived in relative obscurity, but his famous novel "True Grit" (1968) was a best-seller and was filmed twice, in 1969, in a film starring John Wayne and directed by Henry Hathaway and in 2010, in a film directed by the Coen Brothers and starring Jeff Bridges.
Portis was a humorist, but he was much more. His novels, and the shorter works collected in this volume, show a sharp-eyed observation of American characters and American life. He wrote in a deadpan style in which every word tells. His characters tend to be eccentrics, loners, and outsiders without a clear sense of direction. The novels are picaresque and have particular settings but also are road novels with long journeys. With all their sharpness and sense of human foibles, the novels show an acceptance of people and their possibilities more than a social critique. A recent essay by Jonathan Lethem, aptly described Portis, with his focus on odd characters and situations as the "Grand Poobah of the Antigrandiose". (New York Review of Books, June 20, 2024, pp. 34 --36).
Laughter and humor are important in troubled times, as is an understanding of the range of American life. It is valuable to think of Portis on Independence Day and to be grateful for this volume of his writings.
Portis wrote his five novels over a 25-year period. The first two were commercial successes and were made into films. The final three are more obscure and difficult.
"Norwood" (1966) tells the story of Norwood Pratt, a discharged marine, who travels from California to his home in Texas, to New York City, and then back to Texas to collect a small debt owned by a friend. "Norwood" is full of country music and of strange adventures and characters, including a college-educated chicken named Joann. It is an accessible, humorous novel about road life, odd characters, and a seemingly ordinary young man coming into his own. It is a good place to start in reading Portis.
"True Grit" (1968) is unusual among Portis's novels in that it has a developed plot and is a story of revenge. It moves from Arkansas to Texas in the 1870s in search of a ruthless killer. The main character and narrator is Mattie Ross, who pursues her father's killer at the age of 14 with the assistance of the redoubtable Rooster Cogburn (John Wayne and Jeff Bridges in the film adaptations). Mattie narrates the story of her youth much later in 1918, as an unmarried, determined successful woman, devoted to the Bible and to moralizing. Although "True Grit" does not offer a triumphalist portrayal of the settlement of the West, it shows a love for the United States, for the land, and for the diversity and strengths of the people. With all his faults, Rooster Cogburn displays strong loyalties and heroic qualities and inspires Mattie through her long life.
Eleven years separate "True Grit" from Portis's third novel "The Dog of the South" (1979), told in the first person by Ray Midge, 26, of Little Rock, Arkansas, a young man with no particular purpose in life. Ray undertakes a mad journey from Arkansas through Mexico to Belize in search of his wife who has run off with his friend and his car. Ray is more interested in the car. The novel features an extensive cast of characters, including American hippies, radicals and religious fanatics and features a former doctor, Doc Symes, who becomes a travelling companion of Ray and incessantly expounds his view of the world. The novel has a rare sense of the ridiculous while inviting the reader to peer a little below the surface.
"Masters of Atlantis" (1985) has an omniscient third person narrator and involves the story of Gnomonism over a sixty year period beginning with the end of WW I. Gnomonism is a fictitious secret society along the lines of Freemasonry or Rosicrucianism. The main character, Lamar Jimmerson, becomes the Master of the Gnomon Order following a chance encounter in France. He establishes the Order in his hometown in Indiana where it thrives initially and then fades into obscurity after WW II. Jimmerson is gullible but with a sincere interest in spirituality. Most of his associates lack this sincerity and seek instead the money. Portions of the story become a form of road novel and follow the adventures of Jimmerson's acolytes across the country. Portis is sympathetic and merciless in equal measure -- sympathetic to the spiritual search, merciless to the shallowness of his characters.
Portis's final novel "Gringos" (1991) is set in Yucatan in southeastern Mexico. Portis spent a great deal of time in Mexico over his life. Jimmy Burns, a 41 year old expatriate from the United States narrates the story, which features a wide variety of eccentric characters including hippies, anthropologists seekers of UFOs, and ex-convicts from both the United States and Mexico. Jimmy has little sense of direction in his life until he sets off on a mission to the jungles of Yucatan to find and rescue three people who have disappeared. "Gringos" is Portis's longest, most complex novel with Jimmy coming to understand, at last, that "You had to commit to something. You had to plant a tree somewhere."
The Library of America has done a service in publishing this volume of the works of Charles Portis. He has a distinctive American voice. It was good to read his works over the past several months and to write about them in celebration of Independence Day.
