When I
anticipated finishing my reading project in mid 2016, I made a request for the
Christmas of 2015: I wanted a copy of all of Charles Portis’s books for my
shelves. My family came through, and now
that my reading project is done, I have moved on to my 6 Portis books. I reread True Grit first but am now
taking the remaining books in Chronological order. First up, Portis’s 1966 debut novel, Norwood.
When Norwood’s
sister, Vernell, gets married, her husband, Bill Bird, moves in to Norwood and
Vernell’s family home in Ralph, Texas.
Bill and Norwood do not get along, so when Norwood gets an opportunity
to travel up to New York to see an old Marines buddy, he takes it. The remainder of the novel consists of the
travels of Norwood to New York and then down to North Carolina, back over to
Tennessee, and finally back to Ralph. On
the way, Norwood meets with a cast of colorful characters and ends up with a fiancée
named Rita Lee, and makes friends with a British little person named Edmund
Ratner, and frees a chicken named Joann from an arcade fortune-telling machine.
Norwood
seems to some extent to be a comic take on On the Road and other road novels of
the 50s and 60s about seeing America and making sense of this post-war
country. Portis’s interest, however, is
always the people and their interactions.
He has a gift for dialogue and voice, and the book is scene after scene
with the people Norwood encounters.
Portis’s dry wit and Norwood’s deadpan nature makes for a lot of humor
and chuckling to oneself while reading.
Like a road
trip, this book needs to be enjoyed for the journey and not for any
destination. I cannot make hide nor hair
of it in thinking about what the novel is doing on any large scale. I get the distinct impression that Portis is
amusing himself, that he’s enjoying the characters and dialogue as much as we
are. Character and characterization seem
to be the higher aims of the novel, and while I am in the habit of wanting something more from my literature, I found
the book to be very satisfying.
If you have
a breakthrough revelation about what this book is doing in its time and place,
shoot me a note and enlighten me. Go read
it and get back to me, please.
