Charles Portis #2

You can find #1 here and my post about his novel True Grit here. 

The purpose of all these Portis posts (and there will be more) is two-fold:

1. To let me gush like a fan boy; and
2. Convince you to find his novels and read them.

What follows came from The New Yorker's What Charles Portis Taught Us.

In Portis’s case, it’s unclear whether it was the Midgean traction of his native soil that kept him there or some understanding that he could not have built his fiction’s singular and droll terraria nearer to the emanating rays of East Coast fiction in the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Portis’s diffident, modestly gallant characters were a world away from the marital bonfires and priapisms of other male writers of his crop—Roth, Updike, Yates. His male heroes practiced a masculinity that by the standards of the day was uniquely (and unfashionably) nontoxic. It’s hard to imagine the bafflement with which Portnoy or Angstrom would have confronted a guy like Jimmy Burns, from “Gringos,” who tries to persuade two young women to move into his hotel with a come-on like this: “The doorknobs are porcelain with many fine hairline cracks. The towels are rough-dried in the sun. Very stiff and invigorating after a bath.”

***

 In part, I love Portis because I feel less mean when I read him. It’s not just that his novels are gentle and funny; it’s that Portis’s books have a way of conscripting the reader into their governing virtues—punctuality, automotive maintenance, straight talk, emotional continence. Puny virtues, as Portis himself once put it, yet it is a great and comforting gift (in these days especially) to offer readers escape into a place where such virtues reign.

Yeah, he describes our better selves. They might be eccentric but they are admirable.

Also check out Austin Kleon's memories of the author in website, RIP Charles Portis and Julie Cline's A Portis Reader from 2011.

Sch 4/28/22