The Dog of the South by Charles Portis

My wife Norma had run off with Guy Dupree and I was waiting around for the credit card billings to come in so I could see where they had gone. I was biding my time. This was October. They had taken my car and my Texaco card and my American Express card. Dupree had also taken from my bedroom closet my good raincoat and a shotgun and perhaps some other articles. It was just like him to pick the .410--a boy's first gun. I suppose he thought it wouldn't kick much, that it would kill or at least rip up the flesh in a satisfying way without making a lot of noise or giving much of a jolt to his sloping monkey shoulder.

Ray Midge is after his wife, who's run off with her first husband, no-good Guy Dupree. Dupree has taken his wife and his credit cards and, what's worse, his beloved Ford Torino, leaving his own beat-up Buick with a hole in the floor. Through his credit card statements, Ray's able to track the pair from Arkansas to Texas and then San Miguel Allende in Texas; from there he learns that they've made for British Honduras, now Belize, where Dupree has a family farm. Ray is joined by a cantankerous old doctor named Reo Symes, trying to make his way to Belize to see his mother. Belize turns out to be a town as ramshackle as they are, and finding Dupree--and Norma--not easy at all, and what's worse, a great hurricane begins to brew.

God, this book is funny. It's as good as everyone says. I'm not even sure what else to say about it, really. I look over the summary above, and it barely seems to capture the madcap energy of the book; it barely seems relevant at all. The Dog of the South is a road trip book, and road trip books, you'd think, have a kind of forward logic, a plottiness like the journey of Ulysses into the underworld--a metaphor that ought to work even better here, given the general downward direction of the beat-up Buick--but the charm of The Dog of the South is the digressions. It's what happens in between the events, which themselves become the core of the novel. Norma is no more important to the novel than the interminable conversation between Ray and Symes about the cheap business grindset pamphleteer Symes thinks is the greatest author of all time, or Symes' mother's pious chiding--Ray, she informs him, is not a name found in the Bible. Half the book seems to be someone telling someone a story about someone else, someone their interlocutor's never met, and Ray, though the straight man of the novel, is no exception. In this way, perhaps, Portis captures something true about the way we talk and the stories we tell, and how little what we say is actually meant to interest or inform anyone else.

In the end, the book is all digression. Norma, Dupree--they're as inconsequential as everything else. We sense early on that the quest will come to naught. That even if Ray is successful in finding his wife and bringing her back home, The Dog of the South is not interested in giving us the catharsis of a showdown, or a tearful reunion, and especially not a moment where the digressions and palaver are all cast away for the "real story." In fact, Ray does find Norma, sick in the Belize hospital and abandoned, and though the moment has its own bittersweet depth, it, too, is deflating, an occasion for a story, though in this case, it's the story--no less shaggy than Ray's--of how she and Dupree ended up in Belize in the first place. (It's there, too, that Ray sees the body of a man he'd recently befriended, a man who had just before been mistakenly placed in Ray's own hotel room, and it's as if this poor unlucky man has wandered into the wrong novel.)

Though The Dog of the South has its moments of profundity and pathos, I think it's impossible to say that it's about much in the hoary old thematic sense. It's funny and frenetic, what might be called a yarn, and maybe one of the best that ever got unspooled. I haven't read True Grit, but it's not hard to see why the Coen Brothers were attracted to Portis' writing; no other book I've read, I think, captures as precisely their particular picaresque sensibility and sense of humor. 

Deep South by Paul Theroux

Reverend Lyles said he was proud of what had been done at the old Rosenwald school, how it had been fixed up and was now a well-attended community center. The Auburn Rural Studio was still building ingenious low-cost houses. It was not the town of Agee and Evans anymore. It was still struggling, but it was improving, and hopeful.

On a single visit I would not have seen this, but over the course of a year, in four seasons, the true condition of the town had become apparent. This was not a trip about my having had a good meal or a bad meal, or my laboring toward a destination in the old travel-book manner. It may have seemed to some people I met that I was headed somewhere, but I was still traveling in widening circles, happily, on back roads, meeting people, and revisiting friends.

Paul Theroux has traveled all over the world: India, Southeast Asia, Africa. But until he steps out of his door on Cape Cod in Massachusetts one morning and hops in his car, he has never been in the American South. He heads down the interstate, making brief stops in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, heading deeper and deeper into a land that is familiar but unfamiliar, recognizable but unrecognizable. His travels in Africa become a specific touchpoint: the poverty Theroux sees in Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas is not just a reminder of the third world, but an instantiation of it, right under the American nose. Deep South explores these forgotten places, which are not just unknown to Theroux, but to nearly every American, because they lie in the places that even the highways have passed by, where industry and work have vanished, and which the cultural and political leaders of the United States would just as soon turn a blind eye toward.

I'm a Southerner, though I have always thought of my home in North Carolina as quite different from the "deep south" of Mississippi and Alabama. It is interesting to read about yourself, or at least a region to which you are allied, from an anthropological perspective. At first, I felt a kind of bemusement at the Northerner who carries with him a set of bromides about the South, without wondering whether or not they are accurate or true. When Theroux writes that the church is the center of social life in a Southern town, and claims this is one way it differs from his native New England, I thought about how a few weeks ago, I visited Sandwich, Massachusetts--where Theroux literally lives--and ended up at a church festival where a bunch of elderly white Catholics were selling wreaths and dolls and chili hot dogs. Certainly for those folks, the church is at the center of social life in Sandwich. And what do we do with the increasing number of white Americans, southerners included, who no longer go to church but claim evangelical as an identifier? There's an awful lot of cant about the South, is all I'm saying, and it can be hard to set it aside and see the place clearly, especially if you carry your expectations with you.

This feeling was amplified, for me, by Theroux's pointed aversion toward urban life in the South. Charleston, Asheville, Natchez: Theroux passes these places by, stopping in them briefly, if only to tell us their charms have no interest for him. To Theroux, this is a way of side-stepping the tourist sheen of the South, of skirting the guidebooks. But it also presupposes a real South that lies in rural places. Of course you are going to find the South to be poor and rural if you define it from the beginning as rural and poor. But moreover, I found myself wondering if Theroux doesn't miss something crucial about the South by not interrogating the "New South," the cities where industry has fled, where investment in the tech sector, for instance, has created new opportunities for gentrification and dispossession. I'm not sure you can understand the depreciation of Greenville, Alabama, for instance, unless you understand the boom in Huntsville.

But anyway. Most of my reservations about Deep South came to little, because in the end, what makes Theroux seem reliable is the fact that he keeps coming back. Deep South is the story of not just a single trip, but four different trips, each in a different season. Theroux keeps coming back to the same locations over and over again, meeting with the same non-profit leaders, the same black farmers and unemployed whites, the same Indian motel owners. Out of this investment in time a real picture of a region emerges: a place rich in pride and cultural power, but torn inside out by the deprecations of global capitalism and political neglect. By the end of the book, Theroux is no longer ignoring the cities: he spends several chapters on his time in Hot Springs, Arkansas and the capital of Little Rock, integrating them into the larger story of the South as he sees it.

I brought this book with me on a trip to Mississippi last weekend. We didn't quite get up to the Delta, the poorest part of the state and where Theroux spends most of his time, but we did see much of what Theroux saw. For me, it was the sight of a roofless, wrecked building on the main street of Port Gibson, sitting next to a restaurant: someone's business and dream. Everywhere he goes, Theroux wonders why Africa gets so much aid from the USA while its own communities suffer. (I thought Theroux was a little silly in the way he would compare the money given to say, Ghana, population 31 million, to the federal aid provided to a town of 800, but still, point taken.) But among the neglect are people whose roots are deep, and who spend their lives trying to make those communities thrive.

Lightning Bug by Donald Harington

Now in her nakedness she stepped through the thicket and slipped into Swains Creek and lay down in the shallow water, and cooled. She loved her body; that was her one certainty; not the sight of it, nor even the feel of it, but the it of it, the itness of it, that it was there, that it was hers, that it could feel something like cool creek water swarming around it and washing the sweat from it, that it could sweat, that it could be cleansed, that it could tingle. I am a jar of skin, a bottle of flesh, a container. All the things I contain...

Latha Bourne is the postmaster of the tiny town of Stay More, Arkansas, nestled in a hollow in the Ozarks. She is forty and still beautiful, having rejected half a dozen suitors--no mean number in Stay More--content, more or less, to live a quiet life, enlivened somewhat by the visit of her niece Sonora and the adoration of a young town boy named Donny. But her lust--the "for life" kind and the regular kind--is awakened when Every Dill, who was in love with her as a child, returns as a traveling preacher. They rekindle their affection for each other, but they find it difficult to come to an agreement about marriage: he won't have sex with her until they're married, and she won't marry him unless they first have sex.

Reading about Harington's work, I saw the words experimental and absurdist come up again and again, and the most successful and engaging elements of Lightning Bug fit this description, especially as soon through the eyes of the sometime narrator, Donny. Donny calls Latha a "lightning bug" because she, like the females of the bug species, flash their attractive lights in a specific rhythm that calls the right kind of male bug to them--a symbol for seductiveness: "The lightning bug, or firefly, is neither a bug nor a fly, but a beetle. I like bug because it has a cozy sound, a hugging sound, a snug sound, it fits her, my Bug." Within the more experimental frame there is another kind of novel, influenced by Eudora Welty and Erskine Caldwell and, maybe, Li'l Abner: a hillbilly comedy that never quite manages to be funny or charming enough.

Ultimately, Lightning Bug is about sex and sexuality; it paints Latha as a woman driven nearly mad by a lust that Every must be persuaded to quench. It has a particular late-60's attitude toward sex as ennobling and the body as the essential site of human experience, of bodiliness as a virtue. But it has a late-60's attitude toward bodily consent as well: Every, we are told, tied Latha up and raped her before running off those many years ago. It's hard to forgive Lightning Bug this detail, which never seems to be taken quite seriously enough, and which Harington seems to want to depict as a symptom of the kind of passionate hysteria that Every should embrace, rather than reject. Much of what I read depicted Harington as a great and underappreciated novelist, waiting to be rediscovered, and to be fair, I chose his first book rather than his most loved or most well-known. Still, it's hard to imagine modern audiences rediscovering a book that deals with rape so nonchalantly.