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.