More Charles Portis!

 What else I have posted about Charles Portis is here.

Now The Point magazine has a piece on Portis and the Library of America collection of his work by Justin Taylor, Old Weird America: The dark comedies of Charles Portis: 

The hallmark of Portis’s work is farce delivered with a straight face in successions of tightly choreographed set pieces, splitting the difference between the picaresque and the grotesque. He draws on a tradition established by Melville in Moby-Dick, and sustained across the generations by writers as varied as Mark Twain, William Faulkner, John Kennedy Toole, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Denis Johnson, Donald Antrim, Mary Robison, Paul Beatty, Percival Everett and Nell Zink.

“Anything I set out to do degenerates pretty quickly into farce,” Portis told Newsweek in 1985. “I can’t seem to control that.” But one should not mistake lightness for slightness. Portis is a comedian of the highest order, but he is finally—as all comedians must be—a moral philosopher, because comedy, like prophecy, is always grounded in a critique of the world as it is based on a vision of the world as it ought to be. I’m reminded of a remark of Flannery O’Connor’s, made in a brief preface to the second edition of Wise Blood, published in 1962, two years before the end of her life and four years before Portis’s debut. “All comic novels that are any good must be about matters of life and death,” O’Connor wrote. A few lines down, she poses a question: “Does one’s integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do?” For O’Connor’s Hazel Motes, the answer is yes: his inability to refuse Christ is the bedrock of his integrity and the path to his salvation, brutal as it is when it arrives. For Portis’s schemers, dreamers, dropouts, road-trippers, scammers and pilgrims, the answer varies based on who is driving the given story and what it is they’re after. But Portis, unlike O’Connor, has a baseline level of respect for anyone stubborn enough to sustain whatever quest they may happen to be on, separate from the question of whether said quest is worth completing or if it ought to have been undertaken in the first place.

Such pioneer spirit is a distinctly American quality, and nobody embodied it more fully while also mocking it more ruthlessly than Portis in his five peerless novels. A new Library of America Collected Works gathers them together in one volume, supplemented by a judicious selection of “Stories & Other Writings”—all told 1,100 pages of handsomely bound bible-paper well worth your $45 and the mild eye strain. What comes into focus as you make your way through is a worldview that favors that old Emersonian notion of self-reliance, as well as the observation made by the man in Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” that “good fences make good neighbors.” These are loquacious, peripatetic novels written by a guy who thought that people ought to stay home and keep to themselves. Exactly none of his characters are able to do this, and it is from their extravagant failures of silence and stillness that Portis’s comedy derive.

Folks, you can find the collected works here. Do yourself a favor and get it. Learn what is great about America.

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