Revisiting Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre is the first novel I remember reading at college.  I was 19 years old, and I remember being struck by how enjoyable it was to read.  I made a concerted effort to engage with the text and underlined passages and made marginalia throughout the book.  I know this not only because I have specific memories of doing so but because I still have the book in my collection.  Even more enjoyable, Ann used the same book when she read the novel for a graduate school class, so we have her marginalia layered on top of my own.  Rereading the novel now, together, it is clear that she was the much more astute reader, not only because she was much older when she first read it but because she is just a smarter literary scholar than I.

It is ridiculous for me to give an analysis of the text, primarily because the book has been analyzed by scholars throughout the 20^th century, but secondarily because I have already read the essay that aligns with my own reading.  In this Norton Critical Edition is an essay by Adrienne Rich called “Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless Woman,” which was printed in Rich’s On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, Selected Prose, 1966-1978.  The unique and important thing Rich does in her essay is look at the entirety of the novel.  That sounds like something every reader should do, but she is right in her observations that most people only focus on Jane’s time at Thornfield when discussing the novel, but Bronte has nearly 150 pages that take place away from Thornfield, and it is only reasonable to assume that those 150 pages are just as important to Bronte as the rest of the novel.  Every movie adaptation I have seen runs through Eyre’s childhood as a quick overview, as though it were unimportant.  Helen Burns is given a bare appearance, Bessie is almost always elided, and Ms. Temple is more often than not overlooked.  And when Eyre gets to the heath, most movies focus on Eyre’s relationship with St. John, giving her relationship with Diane and Mary short shrift at best.  But all these relationships with other women are critical to the story Bronte told, and to reduce the narrative to a love story between Jane and Rochester is to only tell half the story. So if you’re looking for an essay to make sense of Bronte’s choices, seek out Rich’s essay and enjoy.

Instead I want to focus on a few things that struck me in this reading. 

I remember thinking that Rochester and Jane’s relationship was fucked up when I was 19.  I couldn’t understand why anyone would swoon over Rochester, Jane or Bronte or her readers.  But damn, did it make sense this time, but not because I found Rochester to be awesome.  What occurred to me on this read is that there is some soft domination pornography going on in this novel.  Ann and I kept saying, “#NotMyRochester” in reference to the #NotMyChristian that swelled up surrounding the film adaptations of Fifty Shades of Grey.  I imagine that Jane Eyre was passed around from reader to reader in part for the same reason Fifty Shades was.  If you were into the master-servant dynamic existing between Jane and Rochester, I imagine the charged interplay between them would ring with sexual energy and titillation.  That was a fun thing to realize reapproaching the novel as an adult.

I really like Jane as a character, even as there’s plenty about the novel and the character that I find maddening.  Jane doesn’t take shit from anybody, and to see her passionate and aggressive in defense of herself is incredibly satisfying.  Jane is no Helen Burns, even as she learns from Helen.  She will not lay down and be a martyr as Helen was.  It felt in fact like Helen was there to drive home that Jane is not that kind of character, whom we have met as a heroine in other educational novels about how women were to behave.  So in all those respects, Jane is awesome.  On the other hand, Jane is obnoxiously pleased with herself, her learning, and her behavior.  To listen to her attitudes about her students at the school in Morton is to strain my eyes with all the rolling.

More importantly, Bronte’s unending love for Britain’s colonial mission is an unpleasant pill to swallow.  Her admiration for St. John’s desire to bring Christ to the heathens in India (and to bring them liberty by getting rid of their caste system, no less) is offputting, and Rochester’s tale of his time in Jamaica is disgusting, especially when the thing that spurs him on is when the fresh European breeze blows upon him, uplifting him from the oppressive ways of the native Jamaican people.  I know criticizing Bronte for her belief in the colonial project is nothing new, but the lack of novelty does nothing to alleviate the displeasure I felt in moving through those passages.  Gypsy racism is not cool either.

But if Bronte is unquestioning in her love of colonialism, she is incredibly perceptive in the way we relate to each other as people.  One of the most stunning passages to me was Jane’s conversation in the moor with St. John when he proposes to her and asks her to come with him to India.  She analyses St. John’s desires and her own internal pressures so beautifully that it put into words the feelings I myself have felt when negotiating with a strong personality.  It’s wonderfully written and incredibly insightful.  And beyond that particular passage, I really like the way Charlotte Bronte writes.  It’s clear to me that she hears the music of her language because her sentences are really easy to read out loud, even given their 150-year-old sentence structure. 

I was excited to revisit this classic, and I was not disappointed.  And now I have the opportunity to reread Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which I have done twice before, but never in proximity to Jane Eyre.  So yay for that.

The Best of Richard Matheson - A Short Story Collection

I don’t remember what prompted me to check this book out of my local library.  I must have read a reference to Matheson’s short stories and went looking for it.  The only thing I had read of Matheson’s before this is the first volume of his collection of Twilight Zone scripts, which I thoroughly enjoyed.  I’ve enjoyed many movies adapted from his writing, but never his prose fiction directly.

This 400 page collection of 33 short stories is an interesting and fun read.  Matheson writes in a loose, relaxed prose style that feels simultaneously common and elevated.  He has several great turns of phrases and surprising descriptions that signals his great command of the English language.  Here’s a quick sample from his opening paragraphs of the “Witch War”: “Seven pretty little girls sitting in a row.  Outside, night, pouring rain—war weather. . . . Sky clearing its throat with thunder, picking and dropping lint lightning from immeasurable shoulders.”  Those poetic phrasings are sparsely made, but each one gives a great punch.  Otherwise, the stories consist of simple description and plenty of dialogue.  It is typical mid-20^th-century American literature in its presentation—one of my favorite periods for literature.

Many of the stories themselves have a taste of the supernatural, some leaning toward horror, others leaning toward science fiction, but all of them interesting page-turners.  I was surprised by how many stories were familiar to me, either because they were adapted for film or TV (such as “Prey,” “Death Ship,” “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” “Third from the Sun,” “Duel,” and “Button Button”), or because they seemed to be part of the zeitgeist of the 50s and 60s literature.  Most of the stories have a gimmick or a surprise ending, which you can feel from the start of the story.  An interesting situation or premise is introduced, and then you wait to have it explained to you, speculating along the way (or searching your memory if the story feels vaguely familiar).  The weakest stories have little more than resolution or explanation you are waiting for, such as “Third from the Sun.”  The best stories have a conflict rooted in human needs and emotions, such as “Button, Button,” “Dance of the Dead,” “Dying Room Only,” and “Duel.”

The other thing on display in this collection is Matheson’s ability to pace a story, to create movement and acts even within a seemingly straightforward story.  It does not surprise me that his stories are often picked up for film and television.  Not only is he a visual and sensory writer, but he has a gift for building tension through slowly escalating actions by the protagonist.  There is a lot to learn here about the way a short story is constructed.

As I read the collection, I kept comparing it to the collection of Roald Dahl stories I have (also called The Best of . . .).  The two share a lot of storytelling techniques and tastes.  Both are wonderful and dialogue, both are masters of pacing, and both construct sentences that appear effortlessly written.  I kept trying to pinpoint what it was about Dahl’s writing that I favored, and in the end I decided that it had little to do with the writing itself and everything to do with the type of stories he was interested in telling.  In Dahl’s short stories, the conflicts and tensions are rooted in two or more characters talking to each other, attempting to navigate the difficult terrain to get what they want.  In the end, Matheson’s characters’ interactions, while interesting, seldom make a difference to the story.  Take “Dance of the Dead,” for example, probably my favorite in the collection.  The kids pressuring our young heroine makes for great tension.  I worried for her for the whole length of the story.  But in the end, my worry was a red herring.  The story wasn’t interested in her treatment or mistreatment, only in an interesting way to tell the story of the LUPs.  The characters are props, parts of the scenery in the end.  The stories are still cool; they just don’t hang at the places I find most interesting as a reader.

I recommend this collection, because it is an enjoyable read throughout.  I’ll now be going back to read (and watch) Matheson’s Twilight Zone stories.  But will I go pick up one of his novels?  I’m not sure at this point.

The Unknown in The Turn of the Screw

*Spoilers dot the landscape of this post like ghosts in a Gothic horror novel.  Be warned.*

I had read Henry James’s Turn of the Screw back in my graduate school days in the mid-1990s, and I enjoyed it thoroughly then.  I picked it back up after seeing Floria Sigismondi’s flawed cinematic interpretation of the novel earlier this year.  In criticizing the film, I wanted to reread the novel to make sure I understood the source material. So here we are.

While I enjoy reading James’s prose, I found myself having a rather hard time following the action of the novel.  In part, it was due to James’s long sentences filled with subordinate clauses.  But confusion arising from his sentences was short-lived as a rereading readily cleared things up.  In part, it was due to my reading the book aloud to my wife at night before sleeping, which made me want to reread as little as possible for her listening enjoyment, though I admit I had to anyway just to find the cadence of the sentence which I sometimes lost amidst his clauses.  But of course, the real difficulty comes from the narrator’s desire to speak delicately of her subject.  Much is left alluded to and unstated in the novel, which invites the reader to fill in those blanks, just as the narrator herself fills in the blanks of the mystery that she finds herself in the center of.

It occurs to me this time around that this notion of holes in a narrative and our eagerness to fill in those holes is central to the novel.  Admittedly, when I first read the novel, I was really into it _as_ a ghost story.  I aligned myself fully with the narrator and enjoyed her worries and speculations as though they were my own.  (And that was as a graduate student of literature?! I am as surprised as you.)  But on this read, I was acutely aware of all the leaps the narrator takes in unraveling the mystery before her.  In fact, her leaps actively create the mystery that she is determined to unravel.  When she first spies Quint on the crenelated towers of Bly, she knows nothing about him.  That chapter, the third chapter, ends thus: “He walked away; that was all I knew.”  That matter of knowing is central to the tale.  When Quint appears to her again, this time looking through the dining room window, we are told: “On the spot there came to me the added shock of a certitude that it was not for me he had come. He had come for some one else. The flash of knowledge—for it was knowledge in the midst of dread—produced in me the most extraordinary effect.”  When she knows Quint is looking for another, she calls it first a “certitude” and then goes out of her way to label that knowing as “knowledge” as opposed to a suspicion.  She makes her leaps of knowledge again and again in the novel.  She is certain that Flora sees Miss Jessel, without any indication.  She is certain that Quint and Jessel want the children.  She is certain that Miles distracts her so that Flora can get away to meet Jessel.  And at each of these leaps, the narrator gives no basis for her insight, only that she _knows_ it to be true.  If it happened once, it would be a convenient plot device.  The repetition speaks of purpose.

Of course the central debate about the book is whether there are really ghosts or whether it is all in the narrator’s mind.  The debate at this point is as traditional as the debates concerning Hamlet, so I see no reason to retread that ground here.  Instead, I’ll say that we as readers are put in the same position as the narrator, faced with a bunch of mysterious holes and the need to fill them in for ourselves.  As nature abhors a vacuum so we humans abhor uncertainty.  The unexplained is precisely where our minds grasp at any and all evidence to create meaning and a consistent narrative.

There are a few holes that the narrator refuses to fill in spite of all her certainty.  The central hole, of course, is the reason for Miles’s suspension from school.  This is the central mystery that pre-dates Quint’s appearance on the tower, the moment that sends the narrator’s mind skipping over possibilities.  How could an angelic boy like Miles do anything wrong.  The suspension must either be the fault of the schools, because Miles is innocent, or evidence that Miles is morally compromised.  That uncertainty the narrator cannot brook, but cannot solve either.  Quint and Jessel are manifestations of the corruption stalking the innocent souls.  (Yes, see me filling holes and creating narrative?)  The striking part of the novel is that it never fills in that hole at all; we never know why Miles is suspended from school.  So if we are to find satisfaction in the ending, we need to fill that hole in for ourselves, or at least entertain what it might be.  So let me offer my reading.

Miles says his major error was that he “said things” to “only a few.  Those I liked.”  The narrator cannot make heads or tails of that, but Miles conjectures that those he told “must have repeated” his words “to those they liked.”  I am assuming that Miles was either at an all-boys boarding school (oh, the holes keep getting filled!), and that the people he “liked” were fellow boys.  It seems to me (with my backhoe) that Miles must have expressed love and affection for “those [he] liked,” and his words of love were received by the headmasters as a homosexual threat to be rooted out.  Miles is treated disturbingly sexually by the narrator throughout the book (“We continued silent while the maid was with us—as silent, it whimsically occurred to me, as some young couple who, on their wedding-journey, at an inn, feel shy in the presence of the waiter.”—ew), so it seems fitting to make the logical leap that other adults view the 10-year-old's actions through the lens of adulthood as well.

The book is a quick and satisfying read, not one that can be undertaken in a distracted state.  It requires a lot of attention, but it rewards a lot of close reading, since the holes are everywhere with piles of literary dirt just waiting to be shifted about.  If you can find a copy of Tor’s 1993 edition, I highly recommend it—the cover rocks.

Pridejudice

*Everything is spoiled below, so be warned*

I haven’t read Pride & Prejudice since I was a grad student in the mid-90s, and it was fun to come back to Austen as a seasoned adult. Austen’s writing is always enjoyable, and what I learned this time around is that it reads pretty easily out loud as well.  (I read the novel to my wife, Ann, each night before bed.)

Austen’s wry sense of humor is always a joy, and it’s easy to see why her books still resonate today.  In many ways her books lay the foundation for the modern romantic comedy, creating its tropes and standards in a way I never appreciated before.  (Of course, I say lay the foundation, but I don’t know what books she was inspired by, so there are likely a whole set of books that precede her, though I believe the popularity of her own books set us up for what we see today.)

Coming to the book as a 47-year-old in 2019, the age of Trump and a crushing disparity between the wealthy and the poor, made it difficult for me to take an uncomplicated pleasure in the trials and tribulations of the Bennet sisters. Hearing sympathy for someone who only has 300 pounds a year when you know that governesses at that time made only 30 pound a year got under my skin. And Elizabeth’s love affair with Pemberley is stronger than her affections for Darcy. Yes, I realize that part of the point is that women in this society were entirely dependent on marriage for their financial well-being and that Austen is critiquing and working within those restraints, but Austen never questions the social structure that so well benefits her and her characters.  The concerns of money and reputation make for excellent dramatic constraints and define the stakes facing the characters, but I had a hard time buying into them at this point in my life, even for the sake of the narrative.  The pearl-clutching surrounding Lydia’s running off with Wickham requires you as a reader to accept terms in order to share in the concern.  The same goes for the Bennet girls losing ownership of Longbourne. Yeah, it’s painful to think of losing your family home, and yes, it’s a horrible system that can allow an estate to be entailed, but to worry about these women who have hundreds of pounds a year even without the estate when you know that working women in the class below them live off a fraction of that amount, it’s hard (or at least it was hard for me) to not let that willful suspension of disbelief sag and think these women need to not fear working for a living.

That said, I enjoy Austen’s writing immensely.  The scene in which Elizabeth rejects Collins’s proposal of marriage is one of my favorite scenes in literature.  Austen is an expert at mocking people, and I don’t think I ever appreciated fully how snarky and vicious she was.  I also never noticed how relentlessly she pushes the plot forward in this novel.  There could be Law and Order-style “donk donks” between the chapter breaks, especially in the first volume of this book.  Austen is an expert at getting to her point and then moving to the next scene.  Most impressively, she keeps at this pace while giving the impression of moving more leisurely.

Austen’s critique of Mr. Bennet struck me on this read through as well.  The criticism of her mother is readily known and typically delighted in, but she has really harsh words for her father too who she criticizes for abdicating his role as moral contributor to the family.  It feels like an oddly modern critique to say this loving father let his girls grow wild.  But having just stated Emma, I expect that blaming the parents will be a regular part of Austen’s storytelling.  That’s something I’ll be paying attention to going forward to see if some kind of analysis presents itself.

As a love story, I give the book lower marks than as an entertaining work of fiction.  I have never found Darcy particularly inviting, and my opinion didn’t change on this read through.  Elizabeth is bowled over by his moral rectitude once she realizes she had been treating him unjustly, but as she observes to Jane, the real point at which she fell in love with him was when she saw Pemberley.  Now, the book makes it clear that that statement was a joke, but it feels like a true statement, especially as we see that as she wanders through Pemberley she marvels at the idea that all of this could be hers instead of merely being stops on a tourist’s travels.  If Darcy’s prospects were grimmer, he would not have been a romantic interest let alone a romantic lead.

Austen seems skeptical of people who are socially adept because they are so good at winning favor. I’ll be looking to see if that holds true in her other novels as we re-read through them.

Regardless of the bumps and difficulties for me personally, I am glad I got to re-read the work and am looking forward to the remaining five.

Kai Ashante Wilson's The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps

*This post assumes that you have read the novel and may contain spoilers.*

I was off to a rough start when I began reading Kai Ashante Wilson’s The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps.  My wife and I have been reading novels before bed, or more specifically, I’ve been reading aloud to her at bedtime, 10-30 pages or so.  For the last year and a half, we have only been reading women authors and focusing on science fiction works.  We branched into fantasy with Ann Leckie’s Raven Tower, and then we decided to take a chance with Wilson’s novel because I had heard excellent reviews of it, and neither the author nor his main characters were white.

That there are no female characters in the story was a deal breaker for my wife.  We got through the first chapter, which makes it clear no only that there are no female characters of note but that the society that is the focus of the book is a patriarchal testosterone-filled one in which women are valued primarily as providers of sex and children.  She was out, and I was going to bow out as well. 

But I kept thinking about the novel and the language of it, and after a few days, I decided to pick it back up and continue reading it on my own. 

Sorcerer is about language in a lot of ways.  While many fantasy novels are set in world’s different from our own, they tend to have a common use of the English language, relying on formal British English from the 17^th-19^th century.  You don’t realize how much this has become standardized (or at least I didn’t appreciate it) until you are faced with Wilson’s characters, who speak general American slang and a variant of AAVE, including words like “brothers,” “thanky,” “y’all, “teef” (for teeth), “look-see,” “hot ass motherfucken heat,” “dudes,” “wilding,” “homeboy,” “Fo-so” as slang for “foot soldiers,” and “chuckleheads.” 

When I began the novel, I didn’t know what to make of language, because it felt so specifically modern American in this fantasy desert setting.  The words had historical significance that I thought seemed out of place for this alternative world.  One character spoke French, and the character who had a most Christian-like religious position used “Amen,” which is of course from Greek.  Other characters and places had distinctly Roman names.  It was a mish-mash that felt completely inconsistent. 

But of course, that inconsistency is part of the point.  Each chapter is headed by a letter or tale from other people within the universe, and the language of those passages more often mirror traditional fantasy language, using “husband” as a verb and “an” for “if,” as in this sentence: “And where is there a creature to take such a battering an he need not?” (99).  To add to this collection of voices, even the narrator is made a character who reveals themself only through their footnotes that seek to clarify or wonder over Demane’s language.  Maybe it’s more accurate to say that the editor is a character, since the editor comments on the narrator’s language, so that we have a narrator telling the story of Demane in the third person and an editor who is presenting that narration to us—in short, we have layers upon layers of voices and languages, just as history itself comes to us in layers and layers of intermediaries.

In the context of all these voices and layering, Wilson’s portrayal of the caravan members offers to lay bare the illusion that is the agreed-upon fantasy voice, which is rooted in white European and British cultures and should not be seen as anything natural for our fantasy characters and tales.  It’s a powerful and compelling way to make the point, and it is all excellently done.

On top of that, all that argument and suggestion happens in the background of an enjoyable adventure love story, so that you can greatly enjoy the telling even if you don’t give a fig about the language used.  Wilson has a wonderful talent and building and revealing the history and context of the world so that the exchanges between and thoughts of various characters are rich with meaning and suggestion.  Additionally, I’m a big fan of the scope of the novel.  Given the possibilities that the Wildeeps present, the final conflict could have been as grand and epic as Wilson wanted.  Making the conflict with the Jukiere personal was in perfect keeping with the rest of the book.  At the same time, the story is epic in reach, in that this is the personal story of Demane and how he became the one to watch over and time the Wildeeps when no one else would.

It’s a great story and a solid book.

It is a shame that there is no room made for women in the story.  Having his Aunty be important and a guide doesn’t make her much of a character, and there is nothing in the story that required a patriarchal background.  You can have a fair culture in terms of gender and still have it be homophobic, if having Demane and Isa’s relationship problematic is important.  Having half the caravaneers be women would not impact the story in any way, let alone negatively.  Wilson is obviously free (and encouraged) to tell whatever story he wants to tell, but I know Ann is not the only person who will not make it past the first chapter of this book because of these choices.  And that’s a shame, because this book has a lot to offer a thoughtful reader.

Ann Leckie's The Raven Tower

Ann Leckie is a talented writer.  I find I am never more in love with her writing than when she is exploring a supra-human perspective of the world she has created.  The first book in her Ancillary series was exhilarating in its presentation and narrator.  The two books that followed I liked less and less as the narrator became more of a Sherlock Holmes figure, human, but not.  Here in The Raven Tower, Leckie returns to that exhilaration by taking on the perspective of an ancient god in a fantasy world.

The basic plot of the story is simple and straightforward.  The heir to the throne (we’ll call it a throne for simplicity’s sake) is displaced by his uncle when the heir’s father abdicates the throne.  The heir’s best friend and aide investigates the situation and tries to set the situation right.  The whole novel takes place over only a couple of days, at least in the present time.  But told concurrently with this story is the history of our narrator, going back to their first moments of consciousness when the world was new and still covered in water, and it takes us from then up to her their present condition and intersection with the current story.

The novel moves back and forth between these stories, and each one is made more interesting by its companion piece.  Although honestly, I could have spent the entire novel going over the god’s past because I delighted in that character and their world so thoroughly.  The strongest aspect of the novel is Leckie’s world-building, which is top notch.  Her logic of godhood, their powers, their limitations, the nature of god-spoken objects, the power of speech—damn, it’s all just so good.  On top of that excellent construction is Leckie’s ability to breathe life and personality into the Strength and Patience of the Hill.  Their voice is human even as their perspective is not, and I found myself moved by their plight and confident in their abilities and ideas.

I read the entirety of the book out loud to Ann (as I do with many books), and the reading was always easy, which is the mark of accomplished writing in my book.  Moreover, I could always feel who was talking by the way they were talking, and the dialogue always felt natural, never clumsy.  The cast of characters are lean and focused, each with drives and relationships that charge the interactions.  We were driven enough by the writing to have a marathon reading session covering the last 80 pages of the novel.  And then we couldn’t sleep for some time after talking about the story and the writing and the clever way Leckie gave information throughout the novel to make sense of what is to come and reveal something gripping from the past.

This is a nice story of morality, commitment, and reciprocity.  The story itself is rewarding, but as with any wonderful book, the true power is in how the story is told.

Charles Portis's The Dog of the South

*Spoilers ahead*

Damn it’s nice to return to Charles Portis’s writing.  His magic lies in a number of things, I think: the way he creates vivid and quirky characters who never feel gimmicky, the way he diverges from one story to give you the details of another character or event with just the right details, the way he brings references and minor characters up again and again in unexpected moments to give them weight and resonance, and the way the individual narrative instances feel full of meaning and are completely absorbing so that the reader (or I, at least) am never in a hurry to get back to the “plot,” such that it is.  I leave his novels, and The Dog of the South especially, feeling like I experienced a whole world, like our own but sharper and more enjoyable.

Our narrator and protagonist is Ray Midge, a twenty-six-year-old Little Rock man whose wife, Norma, has run off with Ray’s old friend, Norma’s ex-husband, Guy Dupree, and they’ve taken Ray’s car to boot.  The novel begins with Ray having waited patiently for a month to receive the receipts from the credit card Norma and Dupree took with them, and now Ray goes through the receipts with a map to trace out their journey so far.  He then takes Dupree’s Buick, which they left in exchange for Ray’s Torino, and heads out to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, to find them and get back Ray’s car, and possibly Norma.  Also looking for Dupree is Jack Wilkie, the bail bondsmen who is responsible to seeing the Dupree makes his court date (Dupree wrote threatening letters to the U.S. president).  When there is no trace of the runaways in Mexico, Ray figures they have headed down to British Honduras where Dupree’s mother has a farm, so he takes the Buick deeper into Central and South America.  In San Miguel, Ray picks up Dr. Reo Symes, an eccentric older con man of sorts who is on the run from the Texas authorities, heading to his own mother who runs a tabernacle in Belize.

Ray is a wonderful character and a hilarious narrator.  I love a well-done first-person narration, and Ray is a treat, much in the same way that Mattie is in True Grit.  They are not your classically unreliable narrators because you can readily believe what they tell you happened.  It’s just that they are such particular personalities, so certain in their views of the world, that they reveal how they think about and engage with the world in a fascinating way.  Ray is something of a control freak, critical of they way Norma, Dupree, and everyone else goes about living life.  I love his short exclamations at the world (“Topology!” (31), “Maintenance!” (25, 120), “Strength of Materials!” (58), “Gravitas!” (131)).  I love his cluelessness that he is oppressive to Norma in his rigidness—when he finally locates her near the end of the novel (I warned you there would be spoilers):

The English doctor had told me she could eat whatever she liked but I thought it best to be on the safe side and I allowed her no fried foods.  I had to turn down her request for fresh pineapple too, it being so coarse and fibrous.  After two days of forcing soup down her gullet I had her on her feet again, taking little compulsory hikes about the room.  She tottered and complained.  I bought her a shark’s-tooth bracelet.  I read to her from old magazines until she asked me to stop doing it (250).

This is a narrator I can listen to all day, even as I know I don’t want to spend more than 10 minutes in his actual presence.

Portis has an interesting habit of setting up a strong plot and then undermining it and taking the story in unexpected directions.  In the first chapter, for example, Ray packs his gun in his car for the trip, planning to have it in his encounter with Dupree.  In Texas, he hides the gun in a pie box at the bottom of his cooler, so that the authorities at the various ports of entry don’t confiscate it.  This is a genuine Chekov’s gun!  Only, upon Ray’s entering Honduras, the border agent finds the gun and takes it without ceremony.  Ray doesn’t spend any time trying to get it back or replace it.  The gun is just gone from the story.  When Ray finally tracks Dupree down on his farm, I was prepared for a confrontational scene, but it was a scene of blockages.  Dupree kept Ray at a distance, refused to tell Ray where either his car or Norma was, wouldn’t let him on the property, and wouldn’t give him any leads.  When Ray returns to force the issue with Victor and Webster at his side, Dupree isn’t there and Ray falls asleep in the field instead of launching his big assault.

In some ways, I feel like this is a story about Ray’s journey and the things he lost along the way.  He loses his gun.  He gives his bonds away to no purpose.  He gives Webster Mrs. Edge’s silverware (another item that seemed like it was set up for something grand within the unfolding plot).  He doesn’t buy his Torino when he finds it.  He drives the Buick into unusability, leaving it on the road and abandoned.  He makes no lasting friends (no one in Honduras writes him back, Dupree is gone, Norma leaves him again, Jack Wilkie gives him no lasting friendship, and Dr. Symes has vanished without sign of being either alive or dead).  He begins as an amateur-expert of history, but after making his way through the various battlefields in the Mexican Civil War (most of which he can’t find), he doesn’t even have that to guide him in Belize), so in effect, he loses his intellectual superiority as well.  Bit by bit, step by step, Ray is stripped of his belonging, certainty, and power—though it’s important to note that he is never broken.  The novel remains funny because Ray keeps trudging on with a wry sense of humor and an unrelenting stubbornness.

What we don’t get is a classic narrative of character development.  This is not the story of how Ray Midge went on an adventure that changed his life. Ray may have some moments of insight (say, about the way he should have treated Norma better), but none of those moments add up to anything significant, and we certainly don’t see him change his ways.  You could say that this book is more of a set of characters studies than a traditional “plot,” but there is a solid throughline that takes us from one encounter to the next.

For all that, I don’t know if I can comfortably say what this novel is about to me.  In some way it’s about the hubris of a white American in neighboring countries, but what it might be saying about that is unclear.  It might be about the way that we all intersect with one another without bending or yielding, bouncing off each other and taking momentary advantage of each other, seen all through a humorous lens to dull the pain of that realization.  It might be about how certain we all are (each character is as self-assured as Ray, certainly), and how that certainty creates barriers and miscommunication as characters speak across each other instead of to each other. 

Do you have any ideas?  I’ll be pondering over it for some time into the future I think.

I can tell how much I enjoy Portis’s writing because the politics of the novel, while a thorn in my side, are not enough to kill my enjoyment.  There is plenty of racism threaded through the novel in the mouths of our narrator and other characters.  There is similarly a reactionary attitude toward the counterculture movements of the late-sixties and seventies.  Yeah, the fact that it’s in the voice of this character softens the distaste, but there is no reason to think that these attitudes are not shared by the author (especially since they occur in the other books of his that I have read).  Even if the attitudes are used ironically, they do so in support of racist ideology and they are inexcusable.  It’s a shitty aspect of the novel.