LITTLE ROCK — Charles Portis’ five novels are about everything from horses to flying saucers, and all about people on the go from one odd place to another.
“His protagonists all have a little Don Quixote in them,” being “at odds with the ordinary ways of making do,” according to a write-up in Newsweek, in 2010.
That year’s movie version of Portis’ best-known title, True Grit, brought about yet another in a series of times when the author has been, in the word commonly employed, “rediscovered.”
“Hot rediscovery” was the headline on Rolling Stone’s story that said other writers “have made his name a sort of secret password,” but predicted: “Soon, they’ll no longer have him to themselves.” Still, they pretty much do.
One reason is that bookstores never have settled on where he belongs. Used copies of Portis’ books “can be found all over the place,” according to the New York Times Book Review: Shelved by-guess-and-by golly in general fiction, humor, classics, “and even, in the one odd instance of Masters of Atlantis, science fiction, which it isn’t.”
Yes, and some people will argue that True Grit, the book, isn’t really a Western, and that Portis is more than anything about a state of mind. The books might have something to say about that:
Norwood (1966): “He decided he would sit up straight all the way home and not look at the sights and not sleep and not push the Recline-o button and not lean back thirty or forty degrees the way he had planned.”
True Grit (1968): “People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day.”
Dog of the South (1979): “A free year! The question was: Would I piddle it away like the others?”
Masters of Atlantis (1985): “He was a Gnomon Initiate with a hidden Master, a book he couldn’t read, thirty-odd stitches in his lips and no robe.”
Gringos (1991): “Once again there had been no scramble among the hostesses of Merida to see who could get me for Christmas dinner.”
Style, Pages 55 on 09/30/2012