Writer: Charles Portis #1

You say you never heard of Charles Portis. This is the guy who wrote True Grit.

I read True Grit twice. Once decades ago and once in prison. My copy has disappeared. It is an amazing novel which neither movie quite captured. I managed also to read Dog of the South.  Try to find his nooks. The man was brilliant.

All that said, let me point you to On the Alert for Omens: Rereading Charles Portis by Rosa Lyster. A few excerpts:

Portis’s imagination is truly wild—both unhampered and unpredictable—and reading him for the first time required a significant adjustment to all my previously gathered knowledge of what a person can or should put in a novel if they want it to be good. He is unbeatable at the non sequitur, so that every paragraph contains the possibility of crazed escalation. A conversation Ray has about the Bible with Reo Symes’s mother’s weird friend, Melba, starts with her asking him about a particular bit of Scripture and ends with her saying she will thank him to remember that “all the little animals of your youth are long dead.”

***

 ...The effect of these is to reveal that other people’s inner lives are remarkable, that each of us is walking around, at least 20 percent of the time, wanting the answers to questions no one else would have thought up if they lived to be as old as the hills. It’s hilarious to be in the company of a writer who thinks like this, who has his protagonist make sweeping, unkind observations about the financial habits of children or participate in arguments about who invented the clamp: “The principle of the clamp was probably known to the Sumerians. You can’t go around saying this fellow from Louisiana invented the clamp.”

sch 3/30/22