Writer: Charles Portis #5

Here I end my posts on Charles Portis with The American Anthropology of Charles Portis from Slate. It is part obit and part appreciation.

Charles Portis has died and he was the funniest novelist since Mark Twain, but it’s easy not to know that. His work barely grazed the mainstream, despite going at least two for five in his attempts to write the great American novel. It isn’t fair. This man put William Shakespeare in the shithouse.

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You’d expect a near-forgotten cult novelist beloved by other writers to be “difficult,” or to “require context.” But Charles Portis wrote five of the funniest, most accessible novels you will ever read. Not one of his books is an unreadable postmodern cinder block. And this is central to his genius.

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 His plots—a fourteen-year-old girl avenging her father’s death, an obscure power struggle between sectarian cultists, an aspiring teacher driving to Honduras to recapture his wayward wife after she fled his math lessons and “weekly embraces”—are all about America’s obsessions, weaknesses, and incurable fixations. His grifters and drifters show us who we are: gullible, suspicious, and highly susceptible to advertising. And his cast of charlatans have mastered the American art of self-invention, which the American reader almost reflexively admires. The books are screwball, but not trivial. It’s the interest in the carnies who make the world go round that makes his work ring true.

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...He stayed in Arkansas, a place he believed you couldn’t ever quite get out of, and lived his life. But it’s in specificity where we can find and express the universal. Portis’ novels about losers from Arkansas have aged so well because he understood something about America: We’re a profoundly individualistic country, and that makes us a country of con artists, cultists, scammers, and hustlers sitting around thinking hard about cartoons. Once you learn that, you’ll never get fooled.

I think that sums up Portis for me.

What else I have written on Portis can be accessed by starting here.

sch 5/18/22

Fresh Air review of his last book here.

5/30/22