Receive Your Copy The Dog Of The South Penned By Charles Portis Accessible As Volume

really enjoyed sitelinkTrue Grit and had high hopes for this book about a road trip through places that I personally took road trips through back in my misspent youth.


Unfortunately, The book is mostly about unpleasant people having tedious conversations, There is little story progression and even less plot, If this isn't bad enough, Portis, or at least his publishers, are guilty of an egregious case of false advertising, The title and the books cover suggest, and on some covers state outright, that the story is about a road trip through Mexico in a retired school bus named "The Dog of the South".
Nothing could be further from the truth, In Mexico, they would refer to such claims as mentiras or basura, Up where I come from we aren't quite so refined so I just call it bullshit, The truth is that, although said school bus does make an appearance but it is broken down when we encounter it and it never gets repaired, It occupies maybe one page out of the entire book,

Charles Portis does deserve come credit, He manages, without coming out directly and saying it, to show the reader what a clueless dufus Ray Midge is and exactly why Norma left him, even though she herself, was unable to explain her reasons.
In the course of all of these wacky conversations, the reader does get a sense of what the characters, Ray in particular, are really like, An author who can let his readers know that it is a dark and stormy night without mentioning the weather deserves some credit,

Bottom line: I had high hopes for this book but in the end was very disappointed, Nevertheless, my thanks to the folks at the sitelink On the Southern Literary Trail group for giving me the opportunity to read and discuss this and many other better books.
Not the book I was expecting, From the writer of True Grit I was expecting a more masculine book, full of tough cowboy types, but this was funny and has a protagonist who is nervy, pernickety and, in all honesty, adorably dull.

We meet Midge as he sets off to locate his errant wife who has run off with his ex coworker Dupree, To add insult to injury the cuckolding pair take Midges car and leave Duprees beaten up rust bucket behind, In the days before APNR and mobile phones the only way to locate them is to check the credit card bill which shows they have been running up bills in Mexico at his expense.

Unable to get access to funds from his father, Midge takes to the road with an eccentric doctor who is living in a converted school bus and wants to travel to Belize to see his mother who came as a missionary and stayed to set up her own church.

If you like a lot of action and events in your books, this is probably not for you, It

is completely character driven and full of wonderfully wry observations, The writing is funny and wise to the ways of human nature and frailties, The characters are eccentric and exaggerated but never descend into unbelievability, they are portrayed with a warmth that keeps them the right side of annoying,
One highlight was the irritation with the difference between US and English English which I always enjoy though this time it was the American finding fault cheeky I know,
“The young British officer, none too sure of himself before, pulled Jack bodily from the cab and told him to stay away from his vehicles in future rather than in the future.
”
And this from our Midge to Webster, a young Belize boy who works in the hotel he is staying in,
“I dont know, Webster, I tell you I cant answer questions like that, You see me as a cando guy from the States, but I dont have all the answers, Im white and I dont dance but that doesnt mean I have all the answers, ”
Were with you on that Midge, When I say something is funny and you say something is funny, I'm usually not sure if our funnies are congruousor 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 honesttogoshness 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 sparklyshadowed eyes.
Bitch, please. All it needed was a kazoo soundtrack, and then abracadabra: sublimity, pure sublimity! But The Hangover had about as many yuksperminute 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 preorder The Hangover 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 KüblerRoss book for you, My sense of humor is particular, I generally don't go in for outright silliness or slippingonbanana peels or piesinfaces 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 highstakes 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 okaythis is thes, 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 Midges car and credit card and takes off with Norma through Texas and Mexicoeventually 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 hicklikely by his own admissionwho knows about cars and guns, as a matter of course, but he is, at the same time, selfdeprecating, halfassedworldly, and very, very smart.
He has a talent for feeling people out and reacting accordingly, But his isnt 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 strideeach and every peculiarity and catastrophe.
The world, odd as it is, is something to marvel at, sure, but not for long, When all the marvelings done, a crooked doctor, a deranged, gunwielding radical, and a sudden hurricane are just more thingsontopofthings to contend with,

Also, Midge has no idea that hes funny, Not one clue. And thats 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 oneliners, Its the totality of Midges addled but persevering perspective that frames a comedy he cant quite recognize because hes standing nosetonose with it,
Reading this whole novel was a displacement activity Im supposed to be reading the Cormac McCarthy masterpiece Blood Meridian according to my Currently Reading list here.
But thats so grim, so very grim, that I found myself idly picking up The Dog of the South and after the first page I found myself cheating on my Currently Reading list and breaking the cardinal rule Thou Shalt Not Read Two Novels at the Same Time.


Charles Portis was a master of American voices, it seems, Mattie Ross from True Grit has a unique unwittinglyfunny deadpan way of describing her desperate adventures, one of the greatest characters of modern fiction, In this later novel, our man Ray Midge, who isgoingon, is secondcousintwiceremoved to Mattie, with again a whole lot of deadpan humour,

Ray is himself on a road trip from Arkansas to British Honduras to try to find his vamoosed wife, Rays account of the whole thing tries to omit nothing, particularly the details of all the cars involved,

With this support gone the least acceleration would throw the engine over to the right from the torque, and the fanblades would clatter against the shroud.
I straightened out two coat hangers and fastened one end of the stiff wires to the exhaust manifold on the left side, and anchored the other ends to the frame memberI thought it was a clever piece of work even though I burned my fingers on the manifold.


Ray is fairly meek and geeky and he has to steel himself to confront Guy Dupree, the bounder who has run off with Norma, Mrs Midge.
Once found, Dupree says stuff like

I have aMagnum out here in the glove compartment, Its as big as a flare pistol, You can fire just four more rounds from it and the next day the arch of your hand is so sore and numb you cant pick up a dime.
That may give you some idea of its power and range,

In response to these manly growlings, later on Ray organises two small boys to throw stones at Duprees house,

Ray has opportunity to observe Duprees manners, and is understandably critical :

He went over to the green tractor and climbed on it and tried to start it.
It was a diesel and by nature hard to start, Dupree lacked patience. His contempt for machinery was unpleasant to watch, He slammed and wrenched things about,

Naturally he likes to contrast Duprees rubbishness with his own excellent qualities :

I watched the windows for NormaI was always good at catching roach movement or mouse movement from the corner of my eye.
Small or large, any object in my presence had only to change its position slightly, by no more than a centimeter, and my head would snap about and the thing would be instantly trapped by my gaze.


So this is a road trip story and of course has to include a garrulous eccentric, So we get Dr Reo Symes who talks like a Tom Waits monologue, Hes the veteran of a thousand failed get rich quick schemes, and says stuff like

This was my arthritis clinic, The Brewster Method. Massive doses of gold salts and nuxated zinc followed by thirty pushups and a twelveminute nap, None of your thermo tubs or hydro baloney, You dont hear much about it anymore but for my money its never been discredited,

One page later hes still rattling on about medical matters

He had an interest in a denture factory in Tijuana and he was trying to get a US patent on their El Tigre model.
They were wonderful teeth. They had two extra canines and two extra incisors of tungsten steel, Slap a set of tiger plate in your mouth and you can throw your oatmeal out the window,

Well True Grit is a beautiful sublimated love story and this one is just a blast of fun so noand really this is a solid.
stars, but perfect for taking your mind off the end of civilisation as we know it, .