The Dog of the South

'The Dog of the South' is a perfect novel. This sounds like hyperbole. It is short; there is very little in the way of plot; the characters do not develop in any way: yet the book is as engaging and entertaining as anything I have ever read. Before embarking on my second reading (just a fortnight after I finished my first) I planned to write down my favourite lines from the book. I gave up because I was transcribing almost the entire novel. No synopsis can do it justice. Ray Blount, Jr. has said of this book that 'no-one should die without reading it.' I'm with him all the way.

It's great to see Portis' finest novel getting a little attention at last. Pity it took everyone 20 years to notice that Dog of the South is a masterpiece. Here are the Seventies as they were lived outside Hollywood:an American "Era of Stagnation," a stagnant pond in which tiny creatures like Ray Midge, protagonist of this novel, move in little circles. Ray is a bore, a weapons-nerd and military-history pedant, a tiresome "selfish little fox" in the words of his dancing ex-mother-in-law and "an effete yeoman" in his own estimation. But he is also the voice to which Portis assigns some of the funniest and most beautiful sentences ever written. Ray's failed attempt to live out an heroic tale of vengeance is the story, and it's a great story; but it's Portis' extraordinary prose that will stay with you long after you finish this novel. My brothers and I, who had read this novel dozens of times, used to conduct whole conversations consisting of memorized sentences from the novel. It's that good.

I read NORWOOD when I was about eleven years old, and loved it, reading it once or twice a year until well into my teens, when the book either fell apart or got lost somewhere.Imagine my joy at being enfolded in Charles Portis' marvelous universe once again, where a man puts plastic bags on his junkyard dog's feet because the dog doesn't like getting his feet wet;old men in big shoes and smocks hollar outside motel rooms, and, when confronted say, "I'm just fooling around," and missionaries politely disagree over who is more destructive: human beings or goats.This book is a million laughs. Readers of NORWOOD might find some similarities between the narrator/protagonist and Norwood's brother-in-law Bill Bird.

Portis is perhaps the most underrated comic novelists of our time. When you finish reading Dog of the South, get Norwood and Gringos, two other hilarious and gracefully written books. Please tell Mr Portis to write another novel--he hasn't for some time, and I need a Portis refill round about now.

This book is absolutely hilarious. Why haven't I heard of this author? My goodness, it took an exerpt in the Atlantic Monthly to hook me but I was literally in tears of laughter after reading a few pages. Imagine Garrison Keillor on LSD and you have Portis.