Brandy: Giri, one of the first things you note in your lovely introductory essay yesterday about this book is Portis’s absolute control and precision. This was my third time reading it and I am always struck by how this book can be so full of little details, so bursting with asides and minor characters and theories and surprising phrases, but still feel restrained.
Kelsey: This was my first time reading this book, and I looked at how thick it is and thought I would read it really quickly. But I found myself reading a little bit of it every day instead of gulping it down. I think that’s because of the precision. Even the tiniest details (the orange pills, the professor’s lecture on tape, the silver, etc.) come back at some point, and that is so satisfying as a reader.
Barry: One thing I love is how it doesn’t dwell on any of the characters’ bizarre asides or impossible assertions. Really captures the experience of being stuck talking to a weirdo—you just gotta keep it moving. I wish I had Kelsey’s restraint: I finished this in a day because it moved so quickly.
David: I read it years ago, during a year in which I read all of Portis’s novels, not quite back to back but as quickly as I could. I probably should have been more patient about it, but I was so excited that there were more things like that to read, that I had not previously known existed. For a novelist who more or less disappeared from the cultural radar for decades, there was so much in these books—the worldview and style and sense of humor, the both masterful and oddly offhand approach to storytelling as a concept—that I had seen and loved elsewhere. It felt like I’d discovered some sort of secret original text that explained where, for instance, the Coen Brothers came from.
Patrick: I read it like you Barry. There’s a structural coherence and density that surely lends itself to close re-reading, though I found the rhythm of the book to be lively enough that it worked best when allowed to wash over you at speed. It is closer to the whirlwind (literal, in one case) experience that Ray is having.
To the point of style, which Giri also focused on in his longer review: when I was getting started as a writer, I used to think “good writing” meant florid sentences with half a dozen distinct punctuation marks, though the more I read and write, the more I think “good writing” is something like Portis describing a bunch of people watching the wrong movie with, “We could watch this thing all night and he wasn’t going to stop being Dave.”
Giri: Yeah, one of the really distinctive qualities of this book is that it’s so funny without being shaggy. It seems impossible to build something this goofy out of sentences this spare. It’s also kind of inspiring. I found myself trying to describe my baby’s behavior in plainspoken Portisese and it was a highly entertaining exercise.
Brandy: May I have an example please.
Giri: "I got her out of all three layers of clothing while still eating my frozen yogurt cone with one hand, which I was proud of. But while carrying her into the bath, the hand I'd placed under her bottom met an expected texture. I felt a dry, narrow poop, about the diameter of a bucatini noodle, that she had deposited along the length of her butt crack. Upon discovery of this secret chalky turd I finally set down my cone in resignation."
Barry: I guess she’s got that gentleman turned all the way around.
GIri: I’m actually concerned by how turned around the gentleman is. I fed her a ton of spinach and pear yesterday. (We’re talking about the scene where Midge asks Symes “How’s your diarrhea?” and Symes goes “I’ve got that gentleman turned all the way around,” the best reply I’ve ever heard to that query. “I’m excreting rocks now when I can do my job at all,” he continues.)
Kelsey: LOL! I think the only thing this is missing is a single exclamation point sentence with some vague general advice. I’m thinking about when he writes that “I lay down on the floor in front of [a box fan] to rest for a minute or two. I was heavy and sodden with jello. Watch out for the florr! When I woke up it was almost 3:30 in the afternoon.” Watch out for the florr!
Brandy: I find myself similarly inspired after reading Portis to pay closer attention. The book obviously trades in a sort of comic exaggeration but the thing is you really do meet a lot of strange people with weird ideas out in the world. I recently had an Uber driver who explained her theory that hospitals don’t actually give you a colonoscopy, they just put you under then show you a generic picture of a colon. I once met a man at a bar who told me he had, over the course of his life, owned a dozen different dogs named Lady, but not all of them were female dogs.
David: This is an experience that I had many times during and after reading the book, the whole world suddenly seeming kind of sprung and Portis-y in ways that it almost certainly wasn’t. Obviously you will bounce off of a decent number of strange people in your day to day if you leave your home, and not all of them will be charming or even very interesting, but the constellation of weirdos in this book—most of whom, also, are not very charming or interesting on the merits—made the ones I encountered shine that much more. “Ah,” I might have and probably did think after seeing someone do something strange in a way that suggested they did not care about being seen doing it, “getting some Charles Portis notes here.”
Giri: Yeah, we had a nice conversation about “Uber driver beliefs” yesterday and I was delighted to share the story of the man who, while changing lanes on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, rubberbanded his iPhone to the rear-view mirror to show me YouTube vlogs of cruise ships. I watched an acrobat perform on “Oasis of the Seas,” as filmed on someone else’s iPhone.
Patrick: There’s something pleasantly or at least accurately entropic to the world as portrayed by Portis here. Bad stuff happens and you keep it moving, finding a larded tortilla or a malignant Texan in your hotel room if you are lucky. People really are as idiosyncratic and hardheaded as he makes them out to be, and I think you have hit on something profound with the idea of Uber driver beliefs. One of the many ways CP was ahead of his time.
Barry: To me one of Portis’s most cutting truths is that everyone is like this. We all like to think of ourselves from time to time as the one normal person in a sea of kooks. But no. We’re all Ray Midge painstakingly wetting down each corner of his napkin “so it would not come up with the mug each time and make me appear ridiculous.”
Kelsey: Yes, Barry! We are all seeing a pelican get struck by lightning and knowing that no one will believe us when we tell the story but trying to tell it anyway with no luck. The whole book kind of has that “Uber driver belief” vibe in that we are a captive audience to this one character’s perceptions of the world and people.
David: The extent to which everyone is weird in these homebrewed ways is the way in which the book is reliably more delightful than real life, with all due respect to the Uber Driver Belief community. There is something antique about the ways in which the people in this book are insane, and I think it’s because they had to have read a bunch of weird pamphlets or self-published motivational tracts for salesmen to have gotten there. Absorbing shit passively from TVs or your phone could never get you there; an algorithm is cheating, in that sense, and won’t deliver the same result. I don’t want to get too “nobody wants to work anymore” about People Being Annoying, but Mr. Meigs, the character that went around bothering people in bars while wearing floppy shoes, just for yuks, and had a business card made up for himself with that work in mind—that, to me, is a man who is doing something right.
Patrick: The background radiation of every single character running some sort of scheme was so funny, from the hotel lady simply never sending Ray’s letters to Guy Dupree obliquely scamming some Danes. The latter-day Young Pimp Hustler cannot comprehend the get-up-and-go required to concoct 17 of the most insane possible uses for a bullshit island between Mississippi and Louisiana and then forget them and then come up with 17 even stupider ones and then invent a natural gas deposit and then maybe die. We’re losing recipes!
Giri: One element of the non-stop hustling I found really charming is how precise Portis is with the bookkeeping. Midge is managing his inventory like it’s an RPG. We know exactly what items he has at any given time, and we see him try all manner of schemes to convert them into spendable money, pretty much always unsuccessfully. And then in the end he just calls his dad for money and gets it. Great failson novel, too.
David: Just in general Portis has absolute full-spectrum mastery of Types Of Exhausting Person, and demonstrates that throughout. He uses the whole arsenal, and can command all of it. Midge, while not necessarily great company, is so instantly identifiable as a type—a Portis type, that repeats in other books, of being an eager and avid autodidact and a pedant who somehow doesn’t really know anything interesting—that every little spin Portis puts on it drew oohs and aahs from me. When Midge gets loaded at the bar and starts just hollering about all the boring and inconsequential stuff his family has done while everyone tells him to knock it off, I was hooting like Dikembe Mutombo at the damn Slam Dunk contest. He honors all these various American fiction archetypes—grifters and failsons and bores and hippies and barflys—but puts a loving little turn on each of them.
Brandy: Yeah, one of his great tricks is how he wields specificity. A character’s very bespoke preoccupation gives you so much insight into who they are and how they see the world, and this is also how they get to know each other. Mrs. Symes and Melba trying to understand what Norma is about by asking questions like “Can she make her own little skirts and jumpers?” or “Does she like raisins?”
Barry: I think every person probably is just the sum of their neuroses.
Moreover, who was everyone’s favorite character? I’ve got Melba in an upset. I think the loudest I laughed was when Mrs. Symes says, for basically no reason, to think about how “all the little animals of your youth are long dead,” and Melba interjects, “Except for turtles.”
David: That’s right Melba.
Kelsey: Wow. I’m surprised by how hard of a question this is. I think my favorite character is Dr. Reo Symes, but it is really hard for me to choose. The bit about being convinced that Midge had asthma just really killed me. And I like that his conspiracy mind seems to be fully based off of a cult Self Help book.
David: We talked about this earlier but there really isn’t any character in the book who isn’t insane in some way. The ones that would be the most fun to hang out with are the two brothers that live in the ruins, clear brush at more or less the rate it grows back, and seem to be pretty much fine with that; the third brother, who lives in the woods and seldom comes out, might be the most normal character in the book. I agree that Melba rocks, though. No one is doing it like Melba.
Brandy: It’s Melba for me, too, but I find myself oddly haunted by the characters who appear for only a sentence or two. That little girl driving a Cadillac in Texas. Where was she going? The choir members who resorted to “hitting and biting and goosing” Reo Symes because he was singing off-tempo. Where, exactly, did they bite him? Mrs. Clown Shoes, who collects bottles while her husband accosts people in motel bars. What is their marriage like? In another book, I would be furious at the waste of these characters, but Portis is so good I’m content to simply wonder.
Kelsey: The man who is randomly impaled during the storm!
David: RIP to that man. He never got to sell those feathers.
Patrick: Maybe chalk but Dupree. In a book full of cretinous morons, he is the most cretinous and the stupidest. There is a particular type of annoying guy who we have all surely encountered, a type of guy who every single thing they say is exhausting. Simply hearing these guys express Any Thought makes the edges of your head tingle with annoyance and mild pain, and you think like How is it possible to be like this… and then they keep droning on. Portis renders this particularly aggravating energy perfectly, which makes it that much funnier that Norma ran off with him in the first place.
Giri: I love Webster Spooner, and he would be a very sweet nephew to have. I’d probably have to move him out of a box, though.
Barry: Kelsey, I wanted to talk about that guy, Spann. It’s sort of interesting that there’s so much flirting with death in this book—everyone’s always having pneumonia or opioid withdrawal or diarrhea, but the only actual death is this random minor character who gets it randomly and gruesomely. I know not every character needs to have a “purpose” but I’m a little hung up on what Spann’s might be.
Brandy: I think his purpose, such as it is, is to die randomly and gruesomely! One thing many of these characters have in common is the conviction that life or the universe has some grand design, just out of view of our understanding. Maybe God knows it, or maybe J.S. Dix did, but there is a way to come to that knowledge yourself if you look hard enough, or where other people do not think to look. And yet, people fall off the roof and get impaled and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Kelsey: The death is also interesting because there is a lot of time (both in Midge’s experience and literal pages) spent with the contemplation of Mrs. Symes’s death only for her to then be just… in the hospital with pneumonia. And then Spann dies so fast and with so little fanfare followed immediately by the ambulance with Melba in it. Really, now that I think about it, almost everyone in this book is sick. Even Midge is taking those orange pills for his damn headache.
David: It’s one of the most American things about the book, slightly below everyone having some sort of weird scheme that they’re both devoted to and not entirely clear on—no one is making good choices, no one is listening to anyone else, and everyone has some sort of ailment they’re barely managing. (It’s easier to laugh at it when it’s in a book.)
Patrick: Perhaps the hardest I laughed in the book was when he was like George Washington and I have a lot in common, but also not: “Perhaps I should say ‘some of the same qualities’ because in many ways we were not at all alike. He, after all, had read only two books on warfare, Bland’s Exercises and Sim’s Military Guide, and I had read a thousand.”
Giri: Another deeply American aspect: Midge cannot really figure out day-to-day life but he knows every engineering detail about cars and guns. (Except for how many cans of solvent to pour into a repurposed school bus.)
Kelsey: This is actually a question I have. I have read several books in the past few years from the ’70s where people are driving around cars with literal holes in the floor. Did this used to be a common thing? Was there a type of guy who existed that was “car floor hole guy”?
David: I’m going to ask Dave McKenna.
Brandy: I actually think this is a testament to mid-century automotive manufacturing. Used to be you could drive across the country with a hole in your floorboard and a coat hanger holding the engine in place. Now you update your GPS and brick the whole car.
Barry: I found the bit where he kept adding transmission fluid, despite everything else going neglected, funny enough to count how many times in the book he did it—five— but that search also reminded me that when we first meet the Buick, it’s leaking a puddle of transmission fluid! So he’s got to keep topping it off because it just keeps falling out one of its many holes. That’s commitment to a bit.
Giri: This is a remarkably McKenna-coded book. Some dashes of Ratto, too.
David: Speaking of which:
Kelsey: Wow! Thank you, Dave. I think within the first 20 pages of the book, I texted Giri about how much some of these digressions reminded me of McKenna. It’s very beautiful to me to read a book that has such a clear voice for RANTING and RAVING. I would love to ask Midge how he feels about fees.
Brandy: Okay, what was everyone’s favorite rant? Mine has always been “The principle of the clamp was probably known to the Sumerians. You can’t go around saying this fellow from Louisiana invented the clamp.”
Giri: I really like Mrs. Symes’s complaint about other people’s conception of God. “Father Jackie is not much better. He says God is a perfect sphere. A ball, if you will.” When my child asks me about God some day I’m going to be borrowing that one. A ball, if you will.
Barry: Symes’s shifting plans for his island. There’s one rant where he’s running through all these great ideas he has. Baseball clinic! Don’t like that? Monkey island! Don’t like that? Stock car track! Civil War reenactment where Robert E. Lee wrestles an alligator!
David: Symes is speaking real words when it comes to dismissing the rotating restaurant idea. He was right about that one.
Patrick: The bit where Ray was reading Melba’s stories and describing her bad writing: “Melba had broken the transition problem wide open by starting almost every paragraph with ‘Moreover.’”
Kelsey: For some reason, Midge saying “I had read about these Mayans and their impenetrable glyphs and their corbeled arches and their madness for calculating the passage of time. But no wheel!” really got me.
Barry: Wonder if they had the clamp.
