Charles Portis

Ray Midge tracks down his wife Norma, who has run off with her first husband, by following credit card receipts. The trail leads from Arkansas, to Mexico, and into Honduras.

The Dog of the South

Mat Connor

I can be prone to hyperbole—a word I always read in my head as hyper-boil until I heard someone use it out loud in a sentence—but I think this is the funniest book I've ever read. The Code of the Woosters by P.J Wodehouse is probably the only other contender for me. 

I realized while reading this book that all my favorite characters in fiction—Ray Midge in this book, Huckleberry Finn, Mattie in True Grit (another Charles Portis novel)—are all first person narrators from the South who are clever, prickly, underestimated, learned most of what they know through reading and observation rather than formal education, and narrate in an old fashioned manner of speaking as if they are trying to overcompensate and prove they're smarter than people think. That's a specific kind of character that just lands with me every time I guess.

Here is a good sample from this book. Ray Midge describing his enemy Guy Dupree, who ran off with Midge's wife:

"As for his height, I would put it at no more than five feet nine inches — he being fully erect, out of his monkey crouch — and yet he brazenly put down five feet eleven on all forms and applications … He wore glasses, the lenses thick and greasy, which distorted the things of the world into unnatural shapes. I myself have never needed glasses. I can read roadsigns a halfmile away and I can see individual stars and planets to the seventh magnitude with no optical aids whatever. I can see Uranus."

I have the Library of America edition with all of Portis' novels. I'm trying to save them a bit because True Grit and The Dog of the South are both Top 10 novels ever for me. I told you I can be hyperbolic (not hyperboilic). Although I did have an unfortunate stye infection once during university that forced me to hide out from society for at least two weeks that can only be described as hyperboilic. I could make jokes about it but if anyone in my family tried to joke about it I would get unreasonably mad. It made for some tense suppers where nobody would make eye contact with me. 

Apparently Bill Hader has the film rights to this. I'd like to see that movie.

Andrew John Kinney

A few years ago, I read True Grit, after belatedly realizing the movie(s) were based on Portis' novel. At the time, I thought, wow, how is it that have I never heard of Charles Portis? Portis has a knack for producing realistic characters from the rural south (or west, in True Grit) that ring true to me, and a sense of humor that is sometimes subtle, sometimes over the top, but always present. 

The Dog of the South is an unusual story based on a common theme. Midge's wife Norma has run off with his co-worker and would-be radical (this is about 1970), Dupree. But Midge's pursuit of his errant wife (and, more importantly, his Ford Torino) extends from Arkansas through Texas to Mexico and Belize, which was then still British Honduras. Portis' deadpan rendition of the dialogue of his characters, mostly from Arkansas or Louisiana, provide the considerable humor which seems to come so naturally to him. I learned via Google that Portis was the London editor of the New York (later International) Herald Tribune, of sainted memory, so the man had real journalistic chops. Despite this, as he notes in the book, people from Arkansas tend to return there, somehow failing to achieve escape velocity, and so did Portis, who then receded into relative obscurity, a position from which he has somewhat recovered, posthumously. Via his rootedness in Arkansas, he mines a deep vein of understanding of small town southern America, and gives us wonderful characters by focusing on that which he knows so well. His eye for detail in descriptions of con men like Dr. Symes and oddball characters like Dupree or Melba is unerring, and the unobserved life revealed by Midge's internal dialogue makes one do a double take. None of us want to be as oblivious as Midge, and yet, do we sometimes have such tendencies? I sure hope not....;-)

I look forward to reading more of Charles Portis' work; he was a master of his craft.

Really disappointing book considering how many people recommended it on twitter. 