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Charles Portis: Collected Works (LOA #369): Norwood / True Grit / The Dog of the South / Masters of Atlantis / Gringos / Stories & Other Writings by Charles Portis

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This was a gift, and I expected that I wouldn't enjoy it very much. I don't have much patience for a lot of twentieth-century, white, male, American authors; I'm deeply disinterested in the kind of masculinity Hemingway is peddling, for example. As a Southerner, I'm also really weary of nostalgia/apologia for a South I don't miss at all, and I expected Portis to deliver on both those scores.

I'm happy to say that I was very wrong. I thoroughly enjoyed this collection, and Portis has become one of my favorite novelists. Contrary to my expectations, one of Portis's main projects over his body of work is to subvert stereotypical ideas of masculinity in really surprising ways. For example, in Norwood, the protagonist is this sweetly goofy guy who bumbles cluelessly through life being kind and generous to everyone around him and being taken in by con men but who manages to come out all right in the end. In True Grit, the character with true grit is a 14 year old girl, and the two men in the book are a drunken sad sack and a braggart. Dog of the South features a protagonist who makes confident pronouncements that are stupidly, obviously wrong and who gets hung up on irrelevant minutiae but who is confidently assured of his intellectual superiority.

Portis is also incredibly funny, just laugh-out-loud funny. Masters of Atlantis is a satire about a guy who inadvertently starts a cult. The whole thing is a con, but he's a total believer. It's very funny, but also very prescient commentary about the way conspiracy theories work.

I think my favorite is Gringos. This novel is the most realistic of the bunch and the darkest. It's still funny, but not in a satirical or absurdist way like the others (well, True Grit is not very funny). I don't want to spoil the plot, but I will say it involves debunking ancient astronaut theorists.



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Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is violent and gory, which I don't mind but may not be everyone's cup of tea. No one is raped on page, but rape is a constant threat, which gets a bit tedious after awhile. I also get weary of the focus on lust and sexual perversion (while understanding that it makes sense for the plot and themes of the book).

Those caveats aside, this was a quick and entertaining read for me. I especially enjoyed the ending--and I do mean the very, very end, like the last handful of paragraphs--which are a lovely moment of grace in a novel that does not contain many moments I would call lovely given that it is set during an epidemic of the Black Death.



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Revelator by Daryl Gregory

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I really, really like this book.

Explaining why without spoiling plot details of the novel is impossible. What I can say is that the sense of place is incredible, the characters are deftly drawn (even those who only briefly appear), and the story blends genres in really interesting and unexpected ways. This is a novel about family and religion and belonging and choices, and it tells the story of those things with the old, familiar songs but also a fresh melody that made this a page turner for me.



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Bid the Vassal Soar: Interpretive Essays on the Life and Poetry of Phillis Wheatley by Merle A. Richmond

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


I get why Richmond pairs Wheatley and Horton; she's the first African American female poet and he the first African American male poet published in the US and they were once published together in a single collection.

But OMG, this is the most obnoxious book of criticism I've read in a good long while, and it brings absolutely nothing of value to our understanding of Wheatley.

In Richmond's estimation, Wheatley has no genuine selfhood as opposed to Horton's genuine, black selfhood; Wheatley's experiences aren't authentic, black experiences as opposed to Horton's genuine, black experiences; Wheatley's poetry is no good as opposed to Horton's; and Wheatley's education and accomplishments are somehow meaningless compared to Horton's because they were facilitated by her white enslavers rather than being self-taught. Richmond writes about Wheatley as if she has zero interiority at all. It's really, really gross.



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Folle-Farine by Ouida

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book is so kinky, and I wish we could go back in time and ask Ouida to what degree the novel is a deliberate, conscious exploration of kinkiness and what exactly she's intending to argue with that exploration if so.

I reread this in preparation for my presentation on Ouida's treatment of birds in her nonfiction essays because it's probably the novel in which the protagonist is most closely identified with birds and the novel which has the most protracted scenes that deal with birds (just in case someone asked me to elaborate on the way in which her arguments manifest in the fiction).

Additional themes include: principles and aesthetics of Romanticism, sadomasochism, the eroticism of self-sacrifice and self-abnegation, silence (both self- and externally-imposed), scathing critiques of Christianity (with some very startling passages in which the female protagonist allies herself with the devil), commentary on art and the role of the artist, sexuality and asexuality, morality.

This is an astonishing and interesting book and nothing at all like what anyone imagines when they hear the phrase Victorian novel.



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