Until August, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The final novel from Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Anna Magdalena Bach, a middle-aged woman, is married and has two children. Every August she takes a trip to the Caribbean island where her mother is buried and leaves flowers. One year on this trip she meets a man in a bar and boldly asks him up to her room. For several years after, she repeats this act of infidelity, but with a different man each time, and in differing circumstances. Eventually Anna Magdalena discovers a secret her mother has long held, one which adds particular meaning to her own double life.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was working on Until August in the years before his death, during which he was suffering from dementia. It’s a surprisingly enjoyable read, an absorbing if minor story about a woman’s meditation on her mother’s death and her quest for self-discovery. While the story sounds sordid (Anna Magdalena’s betrayals are never interrogated; in fact, they seem almost an open secret), Marquez manages a breezy, morally uncluttered atmosphere. The book perhaps most resembles the work of Anais Nin, an explorer of female sexuality and heightened consciousness. The clever, surreal ending will surprise readers with its indelible, Dali-esque image of death and desire.  

Until August, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Published by Viking. $35

JUN24

Space Invaders, by Nona Fernandez

 

A young girl goes mysteriously missing under Pinochet's military dictatorship.

Nona Fernandez is a Chilean writer and actress. Born in 1971, she grew up under the brutal military dictatorship of General Pinochet. Her childhood experiences inform much of her 2013 novel, Space Invaders.

It's the 1980s. Estrella González is a school girl who enjoys socialising with her little group of friends. She even writes some of them letters. Her father and uncle are connected to the Pinochet government. A clue to her father's dangerous job is his missing hand - it was blown off trying to diffuse a bomb. Now he wears a prosthetic one and keeps a cabinet of spare wooden hands. Estrella's friends avoid her house because of the ghoulish cabinet.
The children play games at school, reenacting famous war scenes. They also like to play the video game, Space Invaders. The game becomes a metaphor for the violence and strange silence swirling around the children. When one of the children asks his teacher about politics, the teacher quickly changes the subject.

Then one day, Estrella disappears. She simply doesn't turn up to school any more. As the children grow older, they ruminate on what could have happened to her.

Narrated by many voices, including letters from Estrella herself, Space Invaders is both dreamy and unsettling. It describes a world of children's play, of school and visiting friends, but there is a sense of deep unease as unexplained murders and disappearances invade their innocent world.

A carefully honed novel that expertly juggles its many different perspectives, creating a satisfying literary novel that examines childhood experiences under dictatorship.

Space Invaders, by Nona Fernandez. Published by Daunt Books. 

DEC22

The Imposter and Other Stories, by Silvina Ocampo

 A collection of short stories from famed Argentine writer Silvina Ocampo.

Silvina Ocampo (1903-1993) was an Argentine short story writer and poet. She started her creative career as an artist, studying under Giorgio de Chirico, whose paintings greatly influenced the surrealist movement. Her friend and collaborator was Jorge Luis Borges. In this collection translated by Daniel Balderston (who was also Ocampo's friend) there are stories from the 1930s, when she started publishing, right up to the last decade of her life.

That Ocampo's stories contain strong elements of surrealism and magic realism is an understatement. They are relentlessly trippy, discombobulating, hallucinatory and nightmarish. Her prose has an elegant, Baroque touch that is coupled with intricate, spidery dialogue exploring the far reaches of the human psyche. There are unsettling scenes from childhood (children are a mixture of the saintly and the devilish) and an obsession with heaven and hell. Death is everywhere in these stories and bizarre images abound. A woman and a horse both sink into a swamp; a velvet dress embroidered with a fantastical dragon suffocates its owner; a spider is placed in the bride's headpiece at her wedding. In one story eerily reminiscent of Hitchcock's The Birds, trained canaries peck out a man's eyes; in another a girl obsessed with dolls stops growing. In “Music of the Rain” a famous pianist gives a small concert playing water themed classics while a storm rages outside.

While many of Ocampo's stories are bizarre and beyond interpretation, they are also written as hard, self-contained worlds that have a logic of their own. They can perhaps be read as stream of consciousness writing, often shifting shape and chameleon like. Personality is not fixed and rigid, but floats and interchanges. In the title story, “The Impostor”, we learn of the power of the imagination, or rather the power of paranoia, to manifest enemies. Our minds often work against us.

A strange and evocative collection from a master surrealist.

The Imposter and Other Stories, by Silvina Ocampo

April 2022

Moon Lake, by Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty's Moon Lake

Eudora Welty's short story Moon Lake was written in 1947 and subsequently rejected by seven magazines. It eventually found its way into print in 1949, in Sewanee Review. Welty based the story on personal experiences of a girlhood summer camp in Rankin County, Mississippi. Much of the writing is characterised by sensuous attention to detail, with ethereal characters shimmering through a lush yet ominous  landscape. Sex and nature are fused in richly organic descriptions that veer towards the perverse. In one scene a prim and proper mother accuses an adolescent life saver of corrupting nature itself: "You little rascal, I bet you run down and pollute the spring, don't you?". Welty also employs a subtle humour that sometimes finds its expression in outright farce. Middle class propriety comes undone when ridiculously trying to assert order amongst the chaos of an amoral nature.

The Plot of Moon Lake

Moon Lake describes the events at a summer camp in the fictionalised area of Morgana. Two groups of girls attend the camp, one being a fairly middle class set and the other a group of orphans who are there on charity. The story describes the two different classes of girls mixing and getting to know each other, with the action moving towards a dramatic climax when one of the orphan girls, Easter, nearly drowns.

Most of the story concentrates on the relationship between three girls, Nina Carmichael and Jinny Love Stark, and the orphan girl Easter. Most of the story finds its focus through Easter. Nina and Jinny Love exhibit an all consuming curiosity with the enigmatic and Sphinx-like Easter. Easter ultimately achieves a supreme and impenetrable mystery when she has a near death experience, and is saved by the surly life saver and boy scout, Loch Morrison.

The Pivotal Character of Easter

Most of Moon Lake peers intensely and wonderingly at the orphan girl, Easter. She is a tough girl with a blowsy, "whatever" attitude, offering her trademark quip "I should worry, I should care". Early on she is noted as a leader of the orphan girls, and keeps fast company in the form of Geneva, who starts her holiday at the camp by swiftly stealing Nina's little lead-mold umbrella. Easter also considers herself very much her own creation. When she writes her name in the sand, she informs her fellow campers that she chose her own name. When quizzed on who gave her this authority, Easter brazenly remarks, "I let myself name myself.".

While it's clear that Easter is a coarse tough girl, she's also a mystery that everyone, the reader included, covets. Her very being is so secret that Welty tells us "The night knew about Easter. All about her." In one pivotal passage, which points to the story's main theme being transcendence, Nina ponders what it would be like to transform herself into someone else, especially "the orphan".

"The Orphan! she thought exultantly. The other way to live. There were secret ways. She thought. Time's really short. I've been only thinking like the others. It's only interesting, only worthy, to try for the fiercest secrets. To slip into them all - to change. To change for a moment into Gertrude, into Mrs Gruenwald, into Twosie - into a boy. To have been an orphan."

Enter the Boy Scout and Life Saver

Easter reaches her mysterious apogee when she accidentally plunges into Moon Lake and is saved by Loch Morrison, the boy scout and life saver. Loch is a typical adolescent boy, holding all around him - especially the girls he is employed to watch over - in contempt. When he has to resuscitate Easter he pushes the female company away from him, even 'hiding' Easter from the adult camp supervisor Mrs Gruenwald. These scenes between Easter and Loch provide an almost sexual climax to the story, written in exquisitely elongated passages, a strange mix of sex and death. Welty uses almost explicitly sexual language to describe Loch's trying to save Easter.

"By now the Boy Scout seemed for ever part of Easter and she part of him, he in motion on the up-and-down and she stretched across.  He was dripping, while her skirt dried on the table; so in a manner they had changed places too."

Moon Lake is a rich and strange prose poem, a meditation on the mystery of personality and the ludicrousness of overly civilised behaviour in the face of life and nature's unfathomable forces. Welty writes in an absorbing style that is meticulous and fine, without being rarefied. She also has a taste for subtle humour that gently mocks her imperious females. Moon Lake is a rare and exotic story that demands slow and repeated reading.

Source

Welty, Eudora. Moon Lake. Penguin Modern Classics. ISBN: 9780141196275

This is an old review, written in April 2011 and posted here for the first time.

The Optimist's Daughter, by Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty’s 1969 novel The Optimist’s Daughter should be considered a timeless classic. It deals with the complex relationship between a middle-aged daughter and her parents, told with a remarkable artistry that is at once simple and powerful.

Eudora Welty (1909-2001) was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and is well known as a Southern contemporary writer. She wrote short stories, literary criticism and novels, also publishing a book of her photographs in 1971. Of the five novels she wrote during her long life, The Optimist’s Daughter was her last, published in 1969.

This reviewer is not intimately aquainted with the work of Ms Welty, having only read her rich and strange novella Moon Lake (1949). Although I found that particular work by turns bizarre, curious and generally beyond interpretation, it was compelling enough to get me to re-read immediately. Welty’s prose in Moon Lake is light, rarefied and exquisitely ornate, without being merely decorative or pretty. She writes in this way, one gets the impression, because it is a true reflection of her soul. What may appear artifice on first read, it turns out on re-reading, is a deep authenticity.

The Optimist’s Daughter comes some 30 years after Moon Lake was published, and it’s interesting to note stylistic differences and similarities. The light and delicate tone is there, as is the unerring ability to capture mood and troubled psychological interiors, but the air of strangeness is gone. This is very much Welty telling a‘straight’ story of loss and grief, in what seems a piece of autobiography. As you read this, in many ways devastating story, you get the impression that Welty is writing to heal personal wounds. This sense of honesty, tempered as it is by such controlled and dignified prose, makes The Optimist’s Daughter a literary classic. Written over40 years ago, the novel hasn’t dated. Every page positively breathes a life of its own.

The title is ironic. The optimist of the story is Judge McKelva, who must undergo surgery for his eye. Being of an advanced age, his daughter Laurel is naturally enough concerned about her father’s welfare. He tries to allay fears, insisting that’s he’s always been an optimist. But his resigned attitude to the surgery makes it seem that he’s not an optimist at all, but a fatalist who expects the worst. Judge McKelva has a second wife, the shrewish and selfish Wanda Fay. Her silly attitude and foolish opinions causes tensions with the optimist’s daughter, Laurel.

This is a short novel of 180 pages, divided into four parts. Part one deals with Judge McKelva in hospital, part two shows Laurel back at her father’s house deep in grief and battling her mother-in-law, part three describes Laurel reflecting on her past while going through the artifacts in her father’s house, including details of her relationship with her biological mother, Becky, and part four wraps things up.

In the end, it’s hard to say exactly what The Optimist’s Daughter is about. It feels like a child’s meditation on the lives of her parents, and how their influence created a thoughtful and troubled daughter. It’s about the hothouse atmosphere parents can create for their children, and how it's impossible to escape the past, as it forms our very being. Eudora Welty achieves all this in a novel that skillfullybalances intense family drama against personal introspection and reflection. The Optimist’s Daughter shows how life bruises and alienates us, and how we limp along nonetheless.

The Optimist’s Daughter, by Eudora Welty. Published by Virago. ISBN:978-0-86068-375-9

The Complete Short Stories, by Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O’Connor took as her canvas the Southern milieu she grew up in and observed. Her short stories are thronged with gritty eccentrics and bizarre situations that are true to life, as they are too uncanny to have been invented. She adds to this mix a perfect ear for dialogue and a deeply ironic worldview, making her fiction often laugh-out-loud funny. Her complete stories don’t contain a lacklustre one in the whole book.

Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) died young, at thirty-nine, and managed to publish two novels during her short life, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear it Away (1960). She was also a short story writer of immense perception and intellect. Born in Savannah, Georgia, and educated at Georgia State College for Women, her work is heavily influenced by her Southern upbringing and culture. The language, characters, beliefs and eccentricities of her native South are carefully detailed in a fiction that is strikingly alive. O’Connor’s Roman Catholic faith forms another major component of her work, giving her novels and stories many violent climactic scenes and raw, no-nonsense characters.

Flannery O’Connor’s style is deeply ironic and often outright funny. She wields a wicked sense of humour that is never used at the expense of her characters, but more pokes fun at the absurdity of the world. While the reader may often laugh at the dumbly racist characters in her stories and novels, the joke is never on the simple Southern folk she observed with such accuracy. If anything, her criticism is directed at the do-gooder, educated characters who try to lord it over the bigoted and gullible.

The Collected Short Stories comprises youthful pieces composed while the writer was a student, stories written as the opening chapters of her novels Wise Blood and The Violent Bear it Away, and the mature work of her later career. They are organised chronologically, so the reader can get an understanding of how O’Connor developed her short story style. All of the early pieces such as ‘The Geranium’ and ‘The Barber’ are of a remarkably high quality, and don’t read as the work of a literary novice. For those who have read Wise Blood, it may be a little frustrating to read the early chapters of this novel worked out as a series of short stories.

The strongest stories perhaps come from the middle section, such as ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ and ‘A Late Encounter with the Enemy’. These stories frequently show O’Connor’s dark humour and taste for the ludicrous at its best. This reviewer frequently found himself laughing out loud at the sharp dialogue and ridiculous situations.

The later stories in the collection are not as humorous, and introduce more educated characters and the friction that develops when they try to change their more simple-minded relatives or racist compatriots. This is especially so in O’Connor’s brilliant ‘Everything that Rises Must Converge’, a story that highlights the hypocrisy and cruelty of the educated liberal.

It’s hard to pin down what Flannery O’Connor’s themes are as a writer. She mixes comedy, irony, violent religious feeling and authentic characterisations of the people she observed and grew up with in Southern Georgia. Her ear for dialogue and gift for evocative description make her fiction fresh and alive today, over fifty years after it was first written. She seems determined to paint people as they really are, warts and all, yet doesn’t look down her nose at the racists, blasphemers and fools that drive the action of her stories. She sees the human side above all else, and can sympathise with people who are bad. Like the mother in ‘Everything That Rises Must Converge’ who condescendingly thinks black children are ‘cute’, but baulks at any type of integration.

The cultural landscape in Flannery O’Connor’s stories is bleak, full of hucksters, racists, cheap entertainment and misguided values. What the reader takes away is a raw picture of the American South, of life stripped back with little in the way of spiritual nourishment. Religious salvation or escape from such a desolate landscape is always violent and extreme. When life’s profound ironies are examined by O’Connor’s shrewd intellect, the only response is a kind of laughter in the dark.

The Complete Short Stories, by Flannery O’Connor. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN: 978-0374515362

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, by Carson McCullers

The Ballad of the Sad Café was Carson McCullers’ only novella, and it is perhaps her strangest work. All the usual themes of McCullers’ work are here – loneliness, alienation, the complexities of the human psyche – but the tone is intensified, with many unusual effects employed to make this a fiction that stays with the reader long after the story has been finished.

Carson McCullers (1917-1967) produced a fairly modest literary output during her short and troubled life. She published four novels, numerous short stories, an unfinished memoir and a novella. English poet Edith Sitwell said that McCullers had a poet’s sensibility, and it is this quality that comes through most in the rich and strange The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951).

Readers of McCullers’ fiction will be familiar with her sensitive and often idiosyncratic approach to themes of loneliness and isolation. McCullers likes to mix pathos with humour in equal measure, making for an often quirky tone that is also firmly grounded in the complexities of the human psyche. Many of her characters and situations should in reality seem far fetched, but somehow they manage to ring true. The only explanation for the authenticity of McCullers’ writing is that she was a keen observer of her native Georgia, turning her experiences into a deeply sympathetic fiction.

McCullers’ acute sense of the ridiculous in the human condition is perhaps no where more pronounced than in The Ballad of the Sad Café. The novella is thronged with many eccentrics, and ends in a most improbable climax. This is mixed with the novella’s backdrop of human isolation, of life devoid of much close company or trusted relationships. Everyone in The Ballad of the Sad Café seems on their own.

Plot Synopsis of The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

The main character, six foot two Miss Amelia Evans, seems a precursor to Mattie Ross, the narrator of Charles Portis’s 1968 novel, True Grit. Like Mattie Ross, Miss Amelia enjoys wheedling money out of people, hates sex (the scene describing her wedding night, and her angry reaction to her husband’s attentions, is hilarious) and physically she’s formidable. Miss Amelia, it is noted, once beat a lawyer in a fist fight.

Miss Amelia is married for ten days to Marvin Macy. After the marriage ends badly, with Miss Amelia refusing to consummate the union, Marvin leaves and sets out on a crime spree. He is eventually caught and incarcerated. In the meantime, Miss Amelia has been running her various businesses and mostly spending her time alone. Then a strange little hunchback, Lymon Willis, comes to town, a cousin of Miss Amelia’s as it turns out. The two hit it off immediately, and happily live together, enjoying each other’s company and setting up a café that turns out to be quite popular.

All goes quite well until Marvin Macy is released from jail, and he returns to the town to wreak havoc and frustrate everyone’s happiness. For some reason or other, the hunchback, Lymon Willis, becomes fascinated with Marvin Macy, almost enamored of him, this despite Marvin’s treating him with absolute contempt (Marvin’s putdowns are some of the funniest lines in the novella.)

The denouement culminates with a full blown fist fight between Miss Amelia and her estranged husband, Marvin Macy. The situation is clearly ridiculous, yet McCullers marries the absurdity of her characters actions with an eerie and haunting atmosphere. McCullers seems to acknowledge that deep down we are all strange, and that this is a part of being normal.

It’s hard to say what The Ballad of the Sad Café is about exactly, beyond the mood and atmosphere that the novella exudes. In many ways it is her most poetic and difficult to grasp work, and ends with a prose-poem that is audaciously tacked onto the end of the story, a twenty-two line piece called “The Twelve Mortal Men” which describes the singing of a chain gang. It’s almost like a Greek chorus that ends the novella. “It is music that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright,” McCullers writes of the singing men.

The Ballad of the Sad Café is a strange and rewarding jewel in the McCullers oeuvre. It will broaden the reader’s heart, yet its strangeness and essential truths about loneliness and alienation frightens too.

The Ballad of the Sad Café, by Carson McCullers. Published by Penguin Classics. ISBN: 9780141183695

Clock Without Hands, by Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers' Clock Without Hands is a novel full of perceptive and sensitive portraits, describing the complex interactions of a group of four men from different generations and social castes in the American South. It’s a story told with McCullers’ characteristic humour and pathos.

Carson McCullers (1917-1967) suffered bad health all her life, endured a deeply troubled marriage to Reeves McCullers, and died young at the age of fifty. As could be expected from such a life, McCullers wrote highly sensitive fiction about damaged and doomed people. Despite the dark themes of her work, McCullers could also bring a warm sense of humour to her writing. Her stories and novels often mix the sublime and the ridiculous in equal measure.

No where is this more evident than in Clock Without Hands, Carson McCullers’ last novel. She only wrote four in her lifetime, often spending years on a manuscript. Clock Without Hands was begun in 1951, and started with the working title ‘The Pestle’. The novel was finally finished in 1960, and published the following year by Houghton Mifflin.

Judge Clane’s Dream World of the Southern Past

Clock Without Hands concerns four men living in the Southern town of Milan, whose stories interlock and reach a dramatic climax. The story opens with the middle-aged pharmacist J. T. Malone, who has been diagnosed with leukemia. McCullers here brilliantly evokes all the poignancy of a man facing death, and the unsympathetic responses of those around him. (It’s worth noting that McCullers must have used her own experiences of doctor’s consultation rooms and prodding examinations, as her health was always precarious.)

J. T. Malone is a pillar of his community, if a little dull. He knows well the retired Judge and Congressman, Judge Clane. Judge Clane is the central figure of Clock Without Hands, a larger than life motif for the old ways of the south – both civilised and deeply racist. While McCullers shows sympathy when drawing his portrait – he has suffered greatly through the loss of his wife and son, the latter through suicide – he is also shown to be highly ridiculous and blind to reality. His language is grandiloquent and ornate, while his physical needs are described as those of a voluptuary. Indeed, much of the humour in his portrait derives from his huge, rotund baby-like size. There are hilarious scenes which depict the Judge rolling around chirpily in his bath.

While the Judge is all polite daintiness in his manners, his politics remains that of the old pre Civil War South. He fervently believes that the old ways will come back, with a bit of gentle agitation. To this end, he employs the young coloured man Sherman Pew to write letters arguing for financial restitution to the South, even compensation for the economic damage caused by the abolition of slavery. Sherman is disgusted by this, and quits. His growing anger, which he finds public expression for, can only lead to tragedy.

One last character is the Judge’s grandson, Jester. (The names in McCullers' fiction are often hilarious. The Judge’s wife’s name is Miss Missy, the maid is called Verily, and a love interest of Sherman’s is given the improbable title of Cinderella.) Jester is idealistic yet unworldly, and quietly struggling with his homosexuality. He finds the ways and attitudes of his grandfather, the Judge, intolerable, and in his loneliness yearns for the friendship of Sherman, who is often mean to him.

The Judge, who lives more and more in a dream world of the past, is unable to come to terms with the new world of civil rights and integration. He constantly fails in any awareness of the feelings and sensitivities of those around him, although he is not mean or vindictive. Interestingly, his son, Johnny, had called him irresponsible for this thoughtless work as a judge, often condemning the innocent to death.

Carson McCullers at her Best

Clock Without Hands is one of Carson McCullers’ better novels, on a par with her extraordinary 1948 novel The Member of the Wedding. She has a great gift for exploring the internal worlds of her characters with great sympathy and a complete lack of judgement. This is a novel that is driven by the exploration of four different individual characters, from different generations and castes in society, and how they interact with each other. McCullers gently weaves these individual stories into a compelling plot about human failings and human goodness in a frail, all too human community.

Clock Without Hands, by Carson McCullers. Published by Penguin Classics. ISBN: 978-0-1400-8358-3

Masters of Atlantis, by Charles Portis

Charles Portis is best known for his gripping 1968 novel, True Grit, which has now twice been given the cinematic treatment, most notably in the 1969 film starring John Wayne. True Grit as an indicator of Portis’s overall literary style and themes is misleading, as it stands alone as somewhat of an anomaly in the writer’s oeuvre. While True Grit did give certain hints at Portis’s comic style, it is in novels like Norwood (1966) and The Dog of the South (1979) that readers will find the more typical Portis style.

Charles Portis’s Comic Masterpiece

Portis’s fourth novel, Masters of Atlantis (1985), is considered by many to be his comic masterpiece. Published six years after The Dog of the South, it takes some of the themes and elements of that work, and develops them into a fierce, unrelenting, almost insane page turning human comedy. There is little plot of speak of, but every page is packed full of action and minute detail, enough to keep the reader almost dizzy at the pace and relentless invention. If comparisons are to be made, Dostoyevsky’s The Devils comes to mind.

The Devils (1871) concerns a gang of five political revolutionaries who plot various disturbances that they hope will agitate for change and ultimately precipitate the toppling of the state. In a similar way, Masters of Atlantis, while not dealing in outright political intrigue, is full of the political manoeuvres, personality clashes and diabolical plots that are typical of cults and revolutionary movements. Like Dostoyevsky’s novel, Masters of Atlantis delineates (and lampoons) out-of-the-box characters and their bizarre psychology by depicting a fringe group of self-deluded obsessives who mistake their own fantastic imaginations for reality.

The Devils and Masters of Atlantis are also similar in that the ironic and endlessly inventive style of the writing (bordering somewhere between madness and genius) really represents the content and theme of the novel. Masters of Atlantis has no real plot, point of view or mission. In many ways, it’s quite aimless, more a freewheeling riff, a literary joy ride. What it achieves is an detailed description of the magic thinking that all humans are prey to.

The Gnomon Society and their Masters

The story centres around Lamar Jimmerson, a young American soldier who, when stationed in France during the First World War, comes into the possession of a mysterious book, written in Greek. The book is the Codex Papppus, which Jimmerson has translated into English and then committed to memory. From the Codex Pappus’s store of esoteric knowledge, including such stuff as Atlantean riddles, Egyptian puzzles and a heady stew of alchemical metaphors, Jimmerson creates the Gnomon Society. Before long he’s writing books on the Gnomon way, full of strange illustrations replete with cones and charts. The society is largely ignored, but every now and again it does enjoy spikes in its membership. Interestingly, it’s during the 1930s depression that Gnomonism has its greatest success, to later sink into obscurity.

Like any great cult or religion, there is soon a schism between the main players, and the Gnomons break into two camps, the break-away group being led by the eccentric and egomaniacal Sydney Hen. Lamar Jimmerson sets up a more establishment type residence in Indiana, which is called the Temple. As the years pass the Temple eventually descends into a state of disrepair, with Jimmerson’s wife, Fanny, the only one working a real job and paying the bills.

Another charismatic character, Austin Popper, leads the Gnomon society down a more populist route in order to increase membership. He eventually persuades Lamar Jimmerson to quit his Indiana Temple, which is falling down around his ears and being over run with bums and surrounded by extremely loud traffic noise. Austin Popper has secured an offer by a Mr Morehead Moaler to set up camp in East Texas, living in the benefactor’s fleet of trailer homes. There is finally a reunion between Sydney Hen and Jimmerson, and the Masters of the Gnomon society finish their days as a bunch of mad, domestically useless trailer park denizens.

A Great Novel, But the Ending a Slight Disappointment

Masters of Atlantis has a bit of a flat ending, which is the only criticism that can be levelled at what is otherwise an extraordinary comic achievement. After such a mad, rollicking 300 pages of fun, the reader suspects that a grand denouement is waiting in the wings, finally explaining the strange behaviour of the novel's mad gallery of characters. Portis, however, seems happy to let his bunch of cranks end their days contented enough playing board games and generally living useless lives. It’s left up to the reader to figure out what it all means, if anything, besides the fact that it makes for a good laugh.

Masters of Atlantis, by Charles Portis. Published by The Overlook Press. ISBN: 978-0-71564-097-5

The Dog of the South, by Charles Portis

Charles Portis published his third novel The Dog of the South in 1979, some ten years after his classic True Grit (1968) first appeared. Portis has had a chequered publishing history, writing five novels at rather large intervals since his 1966 debut, Norwood.

For the most part, The Dog of the South follows the same formula as Norwood. Many writers return to old themes and re-work them or build upon them. Oscar Wilde even went so far as to saying that writing was nothing more than re-writes. It’s tempting to think of The Dog of the South as a re-write of Norwood. In both novels, a young man who is a bit of a drifter goes on what becomes a travelling adventure when trying to recover a debt. (There are similarities here to True Grit as well, with narrator Mattie Ross going on a wild adventure when trying to get pay back for her father’s death.)

Light on Plot, Heavy on Colourful Characters

The Dog of the South is light on plot and heavy on eccentric characters and colourful observations. For example, early on there’s this startling description of a young girl driving a car.

“In South Texas I saw three interesting things. The first was a tiny girl, maybe ten years old, driving a 1965 Cadillac. She wasn’t going very fast, because I passed her, but still she was cruising right along, with her head tilted back and her mouth open and her little hands gripping the wheel.”

The narrator, Ray Midge, has been cuckolded by his wife’s first husband, Guy Dupree. Norma (Ray’s wife) and Dupree have run off together and taken Ray’s beloved Ford Torino. A little surprisingly Ray isn’t angry with Norma, and rather puts her rash behavior down to a general confusion about what she wants in life. Ray admits to the reader that he’s a bit of a bore, a homebody who likes to spend long hours reading history and ignoring his wife’s restlessness. He doesn’t blame Norma too much for her decision to up and leave.

Ray sets out to try and track down Norma and Dupree using credit card receipts (Dupree has taken Ray’s credit card). It soon becomes difficult to figure out whether Ray is more interested in recovering his wife or his Ford Torino.

The novel soon turns into a road movie, and Ray Midge is meeting all sorts of misfits and crackpots, most notably Dr Reo Symes, a deregistered doctor. Symes is the novel’s central motif for the crazy side of American popular culture and belief. He worships self-help author and sales guru John Selmer Dix, who wrote what Dr Symes considers a classic rivaling the Bible and Koran, Wings as Eagles. To quote Symes’s colourful language, “Dix puts William Shakespeare in the shithouse.” But Ray astutely figures out that the book is “nothing more than an inspirational work for salesmen.”

Dr Symes is a virtual factory of crazy business ideas and fanciful knowledge. He’s one of those hucksters who always has to have the last word, and makes the most extraordinary claims for his intelligence and personality. In one memorable scene he describes himself thus:

“I wasn’t raised a heathern. My mother and father gave me a loving home. They provided me with a fine medical education at Wooten Institute. I wore good clothes, clean clothes, nice suits from Benny’s. I had a massive executive head and a million-dollar personality. I was wide awake. I was just as keen as a brier.”

Things get even wackier when the reader is introduced to Dr Symes’s mother, Meemaw, and her friend, Melba. By this stage the novel becomes distinctly reminiscent of John Kennedy Toole’s classic A Confederency of Dunces, another novel about Southern eccentrics and misfits. Mrs Symes, or Meemaw, runs her own church and likes to show popular movies like Felix the Cat to children.

Mrs Symes is as sharp as a tack with a completely idiosyncratic view of the world. When she quizzes Ray on the bible, asking when Jesus turned six pots of water into wine, she asks whether it was alcoholic wine or unfermented grape juice that is described in the holy book. Ray guesses that it was wine, to which Mrs Symes responds “It’s your notion then that Jesus was a bootlegger?”

Charles Portis’s Human Comedy

The Dog of the South provides a sprawling panoramic view of a particular strain of American culture, with its mix of simple, uncomplicated religious belief and modern economics that seems to winnow the very life and meaning out of the country. This side of the American economy is best exampled in the almost religious devotion that Dr Symes has for John Selmer Dix, sales guru, author and most likely charlatan.

Charles Portis explicitly shows American economic activity as pretty much barren and unfruitful. The reader wonders how anyone ekes a living out of it:

“Leet’s Motor Ranch, a lesser dream, was a field of weeds that adjoined the factory grounds. It appeared to be more of a salvage yard than a used-car lot, more of a cemetery than a ranch.”

In another scene, Ray Midge laments at how pathetic and uneconomic he is, without a job and almost hitting thirty years old. “We are weaker than our fathers, Dupree.”

The Dog of the South provides a bleak and baron landscape, peopled with a host of strange and eccentric characters. Charles Portis is clearly a shrewd observer of people and events (it’s worth noting he spent years working as a journalist), giving his fiction a strangeness that also has the great ring of truth. Portis’s third novel is a comedy, but this doesn’t mean he makes laughs at other people’s expense. Amongst the many laughs, there’s a plaintive tone and sympathy for the humanity he describes.

The Dog of the South, by Charles Portis. Published by The Overlook Press. ISBN: 978-0-87951-931-5