Though he was for a time nominally grouped in with the contemporary figures of New Journalism like Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese, the appellation never really fit. He seems not to have thought a lot of this, and left an ascendant career in journalism to move back to his home in Arkansas in 1964 at the age of 31, where he began to formulate his utterly sui generis fictional voice. A Korean War veteran and former London bureau chief at The New York Herald Tribune, his young life led to some degree of far-flung adventure. But what sort? Favorable (and reasonable) comparisons have been made to everyone from Cormac McCarthy to Mark Twain, but Portis is too singular and too strange to really explain in this way. Portis, the reclusive and much-puzzled-over Arkansas-based writer, is best known for having authored True Grit, though each of his other four novels is a timeless classic of a sort. This is the animating action of Charles Portis’s The Dog of the South, published 40 years ago and, according to many, one of the funniest books ever written in the English language. With reluctance, Ray determines he must set off from his comfortable home in Little Rock and venture across the Mexican border in an effort to set matters straight. Also Dupree is out of jail on a bail bond that Ray has helped arrange. This is complicated enough, but there are further entanglements. Ray Midge’s wife has run off with a man named Dupree, and they have stolen his car and his credit cards in the process. “I should have paid more attention to Norma.”
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