I am more likely to laugh at a movie than a book. I’m sure this is true of many people, and I’m sure there are a host of social-emotional reasons for this disparity, but I can think of at least one craft-based reason, too.
In a movie, the moment of comic release comes and goes in real time. It hits me, or it doesn’t, and then I’m onto the next scene. But when I’m reading, I am always re-reading. I can’t help it. If there’s a false step in the comic setup, I’m going to circle back to it, to see if I missed something, and by the time I’ve retreaded it a dozen times I have annulled the proto-chuckle that had been happily gestating in my belly. But I don’t think I came upon a single false step in the entirety of The Dog of the South, because its author, Charles Portis, has absolute control of the space on the page. Every sentence is cunningly constructed and pretty much every page got a laugh out of me.
It's unusual to read a novel that can be fairly called a “romp” but also a work of such otherworldly structural precision. And it is rarer still to feel moved by a romp. But I think these two features are interrelated. Portis’s meticulousness as a writer accounts for both the density of laughs in this book and its warmth. Because in clumsier hands, this book might just be an exercise in cruelty or pity. The world of Portis, like ours, is populated by scammers, malcontents, wannabes, buffoons, kooks, and marks. This is a novel about a pathetic man who sets out to track down his bored wife, who has absconded with a second pathetic man; during the pursuit, that first pathetic man teams up with a third pathetic man. We could get a sideshow-style thrill out of these saps, keeping them at arm’s length, and leave it at that. But instead, Portis’s prose situates me so deeply in their milieu that I begin to recognize all the things that I have in common with them. If you riff hard enough, you end up in the bedrock of shared humanity. At least if you’re as potent a riffer as Charles Portis.
Let me draw your attention to one representative scene. It’s a conversation between Dr. Reo Symes, an inveterate swindler long since stripped of his medical license, and our protagonist Ray Midge, a cuckolded layabout with a fine eye for detail. These two have had to team up to travel to Belize, where they hope to find their mother and wife, respectively. During their tedious hours of travel, Symes has tried to foist on Midge a favorite author: J.S. Dix, who he says “puts William Shakespeare in the shithouse.” Symes’s arguments have left Midge cold; Midge’s own earnest engagement with Dix’s book has revealed it as salesy hucksterism, like the 1970s equivalent of a Massive Thinks account. But Symes doesn’t care. By this scene, we’re deep into the novel, and Symes is still blowing past Midge’s disinterest to deliver an esoteric sermon not just about J.S. Dix, but about a circle of J.S. Dix impersonators. In my copy, this monologue goes on for two whole pages. Each successive sentence reveals the existence of yet another outer ring of weirdos. A lazier writer wouldn’t bother populating a universe so lushly.
On its surface, this is just an addled rant, but the effect is stealthy world-building. I come to understand Symes through his passions and convictions, and I come to understand the strange world he inhabits. I say it is strange, but it is also familiar to me. In overall form, its rumbling crescendo and farcical anti-climax, this monologue is not dissimilar to what I’d get out of one of my best friends if you put 3.5 pilsners in him and asked him to detail the point guards of the Isiah Thomas-era Knicks. Sometimes this is the most direct way to get to know us—through the structure and content of our hangups. The writer Donna Tartt has written about a funny exchange she once had with Portis. She was talking about her grandmother. Portis said that her grandmother must’ve been a great writer, too. Tartt said she wasn’t: “She would be writing about Grover Cleveland and go off on some rant about the danger of water fluoridization.” And Portis replied: “My point exactly. Those are just the kind of lively asides I enjoy.” This book is largely constructed out of such asides, chained astutely to one another, until you no longer care about where we’re going, plot-wise, but are surprised to realize you would follow these characters anywhere.
Once sketched, the oddballs of Portis’s universe are meant to linger. Throughout this novel, he makes sneaky callbacks to minor cameos from hundreds of pages ago. I found myself jogging my own memory—who was Mr. Proctor, again? And then that red-rimmed eye would snap back into focus. Portis’s approach is to treat all these people with tenderness and precision, if not quite respect. He seems to enjoy their company. I found myself thinking back fondly to a time when such eccentrics were lovable and marginal, and did not rise to the most powerful positions in civil society. His eccentrics just write threatening letters to the president; they are not actually elected to that office. They do not run, say, the federal government’s public health policy, or the technology companies that structure reality. Portis’s America looks quaint and nostalgic compared to the paranoid and post-factual one we inhabit, but its spirit has been basically unchanged.
The clearest thinkers in Portis's universe may well be the children: (mostly) blameless, unscheming, curious, swept around at the whims of weird adults. In my favorite scene, Midge recruits two boys to lay siege on Guy Dupree, the man who had run off with his wife. The three of them bunker on the side of the road and hurl rocks at Dupree’s house. They do excellent work. Windows break. After the fusillade, Midge asks them to pause for an hour, and the kids end up falling asleep. Midge crawls around to a new tactical position, and then he’s out, too. “Baby frogs with a golden sheen were capering about at my feet,” he discovers, upon waking, a dream-like tableau. “Then I realized it was dawn. The frogs only looked golden. I was lying in the middle of the road and I had slept for hours. The world’s number one piddler had taken to his bed again.”
That tone was like a warm embrace. I’ve had Portis recommended to me by many funny friends and, after much delay, this is the first book of his I’ve read. Within the first two pages, I clocked that he was the master of a style of absurdism I’ve enjoyed my entire life. You can identify a lineage that extends from this novel to Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, to, well, our very own Jaguars Junction. It’s a style that has aged unbelievably well. Portis has a talent for lists. Among his best is the roster of aliases Dupree used when writing weird letters to the president, which include: “Jo Jo the Dog-Faced Boy,” “Hoecake Scarfer,” “Home Room Teacher,” “Dirt Bike Punk.” Those were written in 1979, and in 2025, these are pretty much all unclaimed Defector commenter handles. Now take one, read your Portis, and prosper.
Check back tomorrow for our roundtable discussion of The Dog of the South, in which we will all compare our favorite bits.
