Each semester of college was worse than the last and I discovered Charles Portis's novel The Dog of the South when I needed it most, during that last semester. Like another classic American comedy I'd read earlier in college that would prove to be a favorite, John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, the first time I laughed a lot. That's all and that was enough. A sort of innocent read, back when I was still capable of it. And like the other book, I reread the novel expecting only to laugh once more, the same way.
Ray Midge's wife, Norma, has run off with a madman, her ex, Guy Dupree, in Ray's car. He wants his car back. He's not sure if he wants his wife back. But then he's not quite sure of anything anymore - a key shift in the writer's work.
The heroes of Portis's first two books, Norwood and True Grit, face trouble dauntlessly. Little about their inner lives is revealed and basically they remain the same people from start to finish. Portis never wrote the same book twice. And in no other does he so fully confront that silence. Norwood demonstrates Portis's comic brilliance. True Grit, a Western told in first-person, to expand upon and better relish the verbal tics and personal eccentricities of a single voice, avoids devolving into stale genre retread while demonstrating his mastery of plot and structure (and sustaining his comedy). The Dog, a third road book, combines everything he'd done best in both to go in the opposite direction, dispensing with the stoic toughness of Norwood Pratt and Mattie Ross and turning inward with every incident. It's the internal novel, the one that by far displays the most vulnerability, among the five he wrote.
As the book gets underway, the reader learns that the problem with the marriage is that it's loveless, sterile and dull. Midge's affection is expressed in "weekly embraces." His mother-in-law and his wife call him a pill. (To defend himself to the reader, Midge cites George Washington as another pill.) He seems to think little of Norma's intelligence or of how to best cultivate their relationship. In the wake of her flight, he alternates between regret and resentment. Hard to say what would have brought the two together in the first place. Going after her and Dupree (in Dupree's abandoned clunker) to get his car would, if nothing else, help him salvage some self-respect after his humiliation.
On his way out, Midge leaves a note on the door saying that he'd be gone for a while. Later he thinks better of announcing that no one would be home. As he's about to remove it, he sees that someone has scribbled a reply: "Who cares?"
The source of the inner turmoil and fragility that runs through the book, the melancholy that frequently tinges what was once pure silliness, is self-loathing. Midge "piddles away" his years. Falling back on his father's money, unsuccessfully, he notes that some men became governors at his age (26). His knowledge of history is more often than not employed to measure the distance between him and a nobler life. He knows he's done something to ruin his marriage and the mystery, though no mystery whatsoever to the reader, gnaws at him. He struggles to act. Even his struggles are suspect: "I tried to get a grip on myself. Idleness and solitude led to these dramatics: an ordinary turd indulging himself as the chief of sinners." Through the journey, what he goes on to call a nightmare through Mexico and Belize, he seeks omens and chance messages. One comes from a door-to-door clown who hands him a card that reads: "Kwitcherbellyachin" and "adios AMIGO and watch out for the FLORR."
There's a broken-down bus with its name written in house paint on the side: "The Dog of the South." Its owner is the inveterate hustler and drug addict Dr. Reo Symes, who's spent his life perpetually on the run, alone. Portis portrays the hustler figure in one form or another in every one of his novels. Symes is often quoted, for good reason, in laudatory pieces about The Dog, particularly one line about who the all-time best writer really is. Instead I'll underscore what Midge observes about the writer whose work Symes lives by: He formulates his thoughts by instructing the reader to do one thing, then to do the opposite, and finally to be careful to do neither. A vehicle that doesn't move. Wisdom that devours itself. The message, the omen Symes bears is inertia. And himself, as a man with a talent for self-defeat that verges on masochistic.
For Toole, there's hope in escape: the radical change necessary to save a life, the desperate act that can restore one's appreciation for it. But Seneca (an actual Stoic) wonders about the logic of the person who changes surroundings to effect change within. How would it work, given that you carry your problems with you wherever you go? A more modest aim of the escape to count on, then, might be to shake up the pattern of a life that otherwise threatens to slow to a halt. A change, good or bad, but a change nonetheless. Midge's escape is of this type and it leads him to ambivalence. He takes a step toward what he wants to do in life. And his account, he informs the reader, is designed to be honest about everything, resulting in a thorough record of his blunders and shortcomings and deep personal flaws. The joke is on him as much as anyone else, which merits our trust and admiration. Many, however, would consider such honesty plain foolishness. To admit to anything, so the canny thinking goes, is to hand others ammunition, nothing more. Easier to look away from the consequences of your own deep personal flaws, pretend they don't exist, direct attention elsewhere by loudly seizing upon the blunders and shortcomings of others. And with that, an enervating cycle emerges. One might know this, believe it goes without saying, and yet still be tempted to embrace the cheap comfort of willful ignorance (possibly in the midst of meditating upon what's wrong with people sometimes). Midge, at the risk of appearing foolish, also takes the essential first step toward addressing his deep personal flaws, toward becoming a better man, a better person, by making the effort to see them and understand them. By turning the act of self-examination into comedy, the writer prevents it from becoming morbid and unreadable exercise, thereby furnishing a clue about how to make it more tolerable to grasp one's own degree of culpability.
Although Midge also remains basically the same from start to finish (as all major Portis characters do, it occurs to me). In the end, there's no gag, no closure, just a lingering air of sadness. In fact, I've probably failed to do justice to the exquisite comedy preceding it, as everyone who writes about Portis's comedy is bound to fail. Describe a master of dialogue by quoting a few verbal exchanges and one can make the case. Quote an equal number of examples of Portis's masterful dialogue and crowd out, roughly speaking, at least five other ways he gets laughs, sometimes on the same page: an incongruous detail, a novel expression, physical humor, some weird flash of pride, deft use of an exclamation point.... I'm in awe of the richness of his comedy. I always try to preserve at least a measure of surprise for the uninitiated and how one might overlook the pain entirely for laughing will have to serve my purpose this time. As for Midge, whether he does anything with what he's recorded, takes any further steps beyond the first - Portis's characters aren't known for their self-awareness - is left unsaid. The lack of a solution can make the ending seem despairing. I'm not so sure. What I prefer to see is the articulation of a problem. A challenge. A beginning.
