When I say something is funny and you say something is funny, I'm usually not sure if our funnies are congruous—or even related, really. For instance, I've been told (by 'them') that The Hangover was a great American comedy, but I'll be honest with you... there were more honest-to-goshness laughs in Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonata for me. Like in that ripsnorting scene where Liv Ullmann's crippled daughter crawls out of her bedroom in a crime of melodrama so egregious that even drag queens would roll their sparkly-shadowed eyes. Bitch, please. All it needed was a kazoo soundtrack, and then abracadabra: sublimity, pure sublimity! But The Hangover had about as many yuks-per-minute as a holocaust museum. Let me get this straight... some doofuses party and can't remember anything the next day! Wow, that's fantastic! And there's a tiger! And a naked Asian! Ha ha ha ha! I've already signed up to pre-order The Hangover 2 on Amazon!Anyway, this is all in the way of a disclaimer. When I say that The Dog of the South might just be the funniest novel I've ever read, you should not jump to any conclusions. It might be like reading an Elisabeth Kübler-Ross book for you. My sense of humor is particular. I [generally] don't go in for outright silliness or slipping-on-banana peels or pies-in-faces or Will Ferrell. Poor Will. I want to give him points for trying so damn hard all the time. You can see that he really, really, really wants to be funny, and it's his dream in the same way that other boys want to be astronauts, firemen, or high-stakes drug dealers. But wow. Effort only goes so far. The Dog of the South is the exact kind of humor I like. It's the story of this twentysomething loser named Ray Midge (it's okay—this is the 1970s, well before the slacker and hipster eras) whose wife Norma leaves him for her first husband Dupree, a wannabe leftist radical who is really just an Arkansas redneck with authority issues. Not only that. Dupree steals Midge’s car and credit card and takes off with Norma through Texas and Mexico—eventually arriving in British Honduras. Ray follows their trail via credit card charges in a car with a hole in the floor accompanied by the eccentric and criminal Dr. Symes who hitches a ride to Honduras where he plans to persuade his missionary mother to turn over her island real estate to him so that he can build a luxury nursing home on it. Ray, needless to say, is hapless and bewildered. Dr. Symes is irritable and elliptical. They make for a strange pairing.The novel is told from the idiosyncratic perspective of Midge who spends much of the novel taking in the strange world he lives in. He is something of a hick—likely by his own admission—who knows about cars and guns, as a matter of course, but he is, at the same time, self-deprecating, half-assed-worldly, and very, very smart. He has a talent for feeling people out and reacting accordingly. But his isn’t the reactive humor of, say, Bob Newhart who deadpans his exasperation at the inscrutable and intractable world in which he lives; no, Midge takes everything in stride—each and every peculiarity and catastrophe. The world, odd as it is, is something to marvel at, sure, but not for long. When all the marveling’s done, a crooked doctor, a deranged, gun-wielding radical, and a sudden hurricane are just more things-on-top-of-things to contend with.Also, Midge has no idea that he’s funny. Not one clue. And that’s what magnifies the humor. There are no spaces kept clear for a laugh track. And none of those needy inflections reserved for the delivery of one-liners. It’s the totality of Midge’s addled but persevering perspective that frames a comedy he can’t quite recognize because he’s standing nose-to-nose with it.
This is one of those books that will make you shake your head in wonder at how much contemporary fiction is dull, lifeless trash, just because it's so subtle and hilarious that to admire its virtues is to bring the flaws of others into sharp contrast by implication. Portis is really clever about a lot of the things he does in this book, from the dialogue to the characters to the plot, but one thing that I didn't get until about halfway through the book was how much attention he paid to its structure: it's not just a simple litany of failure, it's a fractal of failure! Not only is the protagonist Ray Midge's main quest ultimately unsuccessful, but literally every single smaller aspect of it is too; absolutely nothing that anyone does in the entire course of the book succeeds at all. Midge's wife has run off to Central America with his car and one of his journalist coworkers; the car he drives down down after them tries to fall apart about once a chapter; when he talks to other people nobody listens to him; he never knows the answer to any questions he's asked; no one, not even his wife, remembers his name; he never has any money or cigarettes or a camera or anything useful; he has no friends; and even children don't really respect him. He's a total loser and everything about him is a drag, but it's impossible not to laugh whenever he ends up trapped in deadly unproductive non-conversations with someone like his passenger Doc Symes, a huckster failure on an even grander scale than he is. We've all met people who aggressively don't care about the routinized niceties of conversations, but Midge is such a chump that people talk over him and interrogate him for basically the entire book without him being able to do anything about it.It's interesting to speculate on how much of the Midge character's personality is Portis himself - Portis was trained as a journalist (filling Karl Marx's old shoes at the New York Herald-Tribune, no less!) and from the few personal accounts of him that exist he seems to share a number of the more positive character traits with the quiet, nerdy, car- and Civil War-obsessed "star" of the book. There are some sly jokes about his own profession of writing, as Doc Symes keeps raving about an obscure Southern author who writes all of his books from the interior of a bus. But only a first-rate author with a rare gift for comic timing could tell the tale of this mope on a mission with such amazing dry humor. It's hard to quote good examples of the type of comedy Portis uses since it's so understated and subtle, but the cumulative effect on those who can visualize just how ridiculous these scenes would be in real life is tremendous; by the end of the book I was practically laughing out loud each time Midge couldn't catch a break.I would compare its sense of humor somewhat to A Confederacy of Dunces, but with a little less slapstick and with a little more outright cruelty than is shown to the invincibly obese New Orleaner. If you've read True Grit (or seen it, since it's basically the same thing), then you should expect a somewhat different novel: a larger cast of characters, more sly about its action, but funnier and more relatable. There are plenty of great satires on religion and and relationships and all sorts of aspects of the human condition buried in this book, down to the most minute detail; you just have to keep a sharp eye for them. His ear for dialogue is absolutely flawless, and especially if you've grown up in the South you won't be able to avoid hearing the characters speak to you as if they were right in front of you. It's a real trick to tell a smart story with a dumb narrator, and Portis absolutely aces it here.
Do You like book The Dog Of The South (1999)?
Do you revel in self-loathing and megalomania? Do you have utter confidence in your superior code of behavior, even as your decisions and actions heap calamity upon misery and are assailed by all who come in contact with you? Do you take pride in your unassailable morals and ethics, despite ample, mounting evidence of corrupt motives and murky intentions?You too can be the hero of one of the greatest road-trip novels in American literature!Charles Portis is a treasure. True Grit is the fantastic Portis book everyone already knows. The Dog of the South is the fantastic Portis book that propels everyone (maybe not everyone, just anyone who is worth talking to) lucky enough to read it to want to devour every other book Charles Portis has ever written.
—Allan MacDonell
Pilver wrote: "Amanda, I'm reading DOG OF THE SOUTH now and am loving it. "Inevitable" is a perfect way to describe these odd characters. Did you read NORWOOD?"I'm so glad you're enjoying it! I have Norwood, but haven't read it yet. Have you read it? Thoughts?
—Amanda Morgan
I can only describe The Dog of the South as a comic masterpiece, and Portis is without any shadow of a doubt in my mind a greatly underrated American novelist. I’ve heard him compared to Cormac McCarthy, and I can see the line of thought taken here: the characters both writers create often inhabit a similar kind of universe, down at heel and desperate; both authors’ prose has a poetic elegance about it. However, (it seems to me) the difference is that Portis really likes his characters, he’s like a watchful father who wants to see his children do well, whereas McCarthy, great writer though he unquestionably is, can be a bit like the God of the Old Testament when it comes to his literary offspring; you know - vengeance, punishment, destruction.I laughed out loud (unusual for me) so many times as I lay in bed reading this book. As with all the funniest writing, the people of the story are never in on the joke and remain completely dumbfounded throughout. Everyone in this story is a little bit lost and down on their luck, but you somehow find yourself rooting for all of them, hoping they’ll somehow just find a way to get through. Portis delights the reader by offering us a deadpan narration through the slightly Quixotic, good-natured voice of the book’s central character Ray Midge. Ray, a bit goofy by his own observation, is on something of a heroic quest to right a wrong - well, rather a lot of wrongs, perpetrated against him by the unconscionable, yet pretty hapless, Guy Dupree. I’m not really giving very much away here - this is the novel’s opening sentence: 'My wife Norma had run off with Guy Dupree and I was waiting around for the credit card billings to come in so I could see where they had gone.'A joy to read! Highly recommended!
—M.J. Johnson
