Great insight about the rich tension between registers in Portis. Lit criticism is too often concerned with cerebral puzzling and cultural meaning and the fortification of the critic’s ego and not enough with the only thing that ultimately matters: the irreducible experience of reading the book. Portis’s prose is truly alive, and when you read him, you feel alive in the same peculiar way. His books are things that happen to you. Nothing better than that.
Spoken like a reader after my own heart. That's exactly right. The sheer vitality of someone like Portis, the endless strangeness that's always just-strange-enough, never tipping into being wacky or ridiculous. It's incredible
Reading a book solely for a political message is tedious. I can read lenins speeches if I wanted politics. I want style and character in my fiction. Also plots.
In fairness, I feel like the whole thing about contemporary fiction being too "message"/ideologically driven is a bit of a stretch. But I think a lot of it doesn't have that kind of doubleness inside the language that would allow it to be interesting
I love Dog of the South, the opening of True Grit is also pure genius. I just moved from living next to that exact hill in the Sam Sweet passage, I used to take dates there. I'll have to check that book out.
Yeah, I first read Portis a long time ago, but he's hitting with the force of revelation at the moment. What an astonishing writer.
Sam Sweet's book is wonderful. It's a strange sell, because it's ostensibly about a band--a 90s outfit called Acetone--who were largely unremembered until recently, but the band wind up being kind of incidental to the book's real subject (sort of in the way Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage is both "about" DH Lawrence and not at all so). It's wonderfull
I really liked Dog of the South and still wonder where he came up with the name for that bus. The book reminds me of Charles Willeford’s Burnt Orange Heresy, for the eccentric Southern narrator and crotchety sense of humor.
Oh, man, I love The Burnt Orange Heresy, though I haven't read it--or any other Willeford--since the early nineties. (I did see the adaptation a few years back. Notso hotso, as they say.) I really need to dig back into him. Like Portis, kinda--maybe even more so--Willeford was sort of ghettoized as a certain kind of writer when he was really much broader than that. I'll look again
Thanks to this I just bought everything there is to read on Sam Sweet’s website. Charles Portis’s work is timeless but I feel like we’re in a real “Masters of Atlantis” era.
Funnily enough, what really brought me around to re-reading Portis was watching that show Lodge 49. Did you ever watch that? It struck me as being very Portis-like--specifically, very Masters of Atlantis-like, hence that one's on deck. (It's so good! Both Masters--of course--but also that show.)
The analysis of the Sam Sweet passage is fantastic. Would love to see more close reading like this in book reviews.
Thanks, man. I wish reviews in more places would encourage such a thing these days. LRB, Bookforum, I suppose. It gets thin on the ground after that.
Really enjoyed this. Great insight into the writing. And Any piece that includes Denis Johnson and Charles Portis is alright by me.
Thanks, man. Two writers I could read every day, all day, forever.
Great insight about the rich tension between registers in Portis. Lit criticism is too often concerned with cerebral puzzling and cultural meaning and the fortification of the critic’s ego and not enough with the only thing that ultimately matters: the irreducible experience of reading the book. Portis’s prose is truly alive, and when you read him, you feel alive in the same peculiar way. His books are things that happen to you. Nothing better than that.
Spoken like a reader after my own heart. That's exactly right. The sheer vitality of someone like Portis, the endless strangeness that's always just-strange-enough, never tipping into being wacky or ridiculous. It's incredible
Reading a book solely for a political message is tedious. I can read lenins speeches if I wanted politics. I want style and character in my fiction. Also plots.
https://marlowe1.substack.com/p/job-chapter-5
In fairness, I feel like the whole thing about contemporary fiction being too "message"/ideologically driven is a bit of a stretch. But I think a lot of it doesn't have that kind of doubleness inside the language that would allow it to be interesting
In The Dog of the South, the bit about the guy making the deranged claim about the invention of the clamp ruins me every time.
It's just incredible. That book hits the booster rockets the moment Dr Symes shows up. ("Dix puts Shakespeare in the shithouse.")
I love Dog of the South, the opening of True Grit is also pure genius. I just moved from living next to that exact hill in the Sam Sweet passage, I used to take dates there. I'll have to check that book out.
Yeah, I first read Portis a long time ago, but he's hitting with the force of revelation at the moment. What an astonishing writer.
Sam Sweet's book is wonderful. It's a strange sell, because it's ostensibly about a band--a 90s outfit called Acetone--who were largely unremembered until recently, but the band wind up being kind of incidental to the book's real subject (sort of in the way Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage is both "about" DH Lawrence and not at all so). It's wonderfull
I really liked Dog of the South and still wonder where he came up with the name for that bus. The book reminds me of Charles Willeford’s Burnt Orange Heresy, for the eccentric Southern narrator and crotchety sense of humor.
Oh, man, I love The Burnt Orange Heresy, though I haven't read it--or any other Willeford--since the early nineties. (I did see the adaptation a few years back. Notso hotso, as they say.) I really need to dig back into him. Like Portis, kinda--maybe even more so--Willeford was sort of ghettoized as a certain kind of writer when he was really much broader than that. I'll look again
Thanks to this I just bought everything there is to read on Sam Sweet’s website. Charles Portis’s work is timeless but I feel like we’re in a real “Masters of Atlantis” era.
Also, Sam's stuff is killer. Those All Night Menu books/zines he does are likewise just wonderful
Looking forward to reading his work, and looking forward to your new book as well (which I pre-ordered 😀)
Funnily enough, what really brought me around to re-reading Portis was watching that show Lodge 49. Did you ever watch that? It struck me as being very Portis-like--specifically, very Masters of Atlantis-like, hence that one's on deck. (It's so good! Both Masters--of course--but also that show.)
I will check out Lodge 49, hadn’t heard of it. I’m in need of a new show as I just finished “Franchise”.