Norwood by Charles Portis

The train was slowing for the block in Philadelphia when Norwood suddenly awoke. He was asleep one second and wide awake the next. A thin wall of sunlight was coming through the doorway crack, with a lot of stuff dancing around in it. Something was wrong. It was his feet. He felt air on his feet. He sat up and there wasn't anything on them except a pair of J. C. Penny Argyles. Somebody had taken his thirty-eight-dollar stovepipe boots right off his feet. "Son of a bitch!" He got up and climbed over the floor and pulled sacks this way and that but there was no one to be found, and no boots.

Norwood Pratt works at a gas station in Eastern Texas, but he dreams of being a country music star on the radio show Louisiana Hayride. His sister Vernell has recently married, and brought into Norwood's house, a cantankerous old veteran named Bill Bird. Norwood takes a job offered to him by a smooth-talking local magnate named "Grady Fring, the Kredit King," driving a pair of cars--and a reluctant female passenger--to New York. Norwood figures out quickly that the cars are stolen, and the girl more or less the same, and dispatches both, but still continues on to New York in hopes of recouping seventy dollars owed to him by a buddy in the Marines. In typical shaggy-dog fashion, the friend has gone back to Arkansas--basically Norwood's backdoor--and New York is a hellhole. Among other things, I love how small the stakes are of a novel like this one--seventy dollars was probably a lot more back then that it is now, but it ain't that much, either.

I love the collection of characters Norwood picks up on his journeys. Besides Grady Fring, whose unctuous patter is among the novel's best bits, there's Edmund Ratner, a little person once billed as "The World's Smallest Perfect Man," and a "wonder-chicken" named Joanna who can answer any question. Portis has a real talent for making individual characters stand out; even someone as minor as Mrs. Reese, the mother of the man who owes Norwood money, who only cares about her familial connections to local judges (a Southern archetype I wonder if Yankee readers will get), pops out memorably on the page. And I liked the sojourn to New York, which is clearly in its "bad old days" era. Among the first things that Norwood sees is a group of Puerto Rican teenagers roasting marshmallows over a burning mattress. Still, even in New York, Norwood, a wandering Odysseus, is treated with kindness by some and suspicion by others, the same as in Memphis or on a Trailways bus.

Norwood was Portis' first novel, and it shares a lot in common with The Dog of the South, which is the only other one of his books I've read. Both are road trip novels and both are riotously funny, though I think Dog of the South has a clear edge in almost all of the novel's shared qualities. One way in which Norwood is different is that it's much gentler and more kindhearted. The Dog of the South is a hopeless tale, in which the narrator's quest--to hunt down his missing wife, along with his credit cards--is clearly doomed from the start. But Norwood, who is a gentle soul underneath his cowboy cool, comes back enriched. He does get his money--which is probably the novel's biggest surprise--though, generously, he loans much of it away immediately to the World's Smallest Perfect Man. And what's more, he comes home with a new fiancee, Rita, whom he has picked up on the Trailways bus. The final image, of Norwood arriving home, carrying a sleeping Rita in his arms to his own couch, adds a touch of unexpected sweetness.