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. 

Beka Lamb by Zee Edgell

A severe hurricane early in the twentieth century, and several smaller storms since that time had helped to give parts of the town the appearance of a temporary camp. But this was misleading, for Belizeans loved their town which lay below the level of the sea and only through force of circumstances, moved to other parts of the country. It was a town, not unlike small towns everywhere perhaps, where each person, within his neighbourhood, was an individual with well known circumstances. Indeed, a Belizean without a known legend was the most talked about character of all.

Beka Lamb is a young girl living in the small Central American nation of Belize. Her parents have gone to great lengths to provide her the kind of education few Belizean girls have, but she's squandered it, failing all of her classes. She must labor to convince them to send her back for the next year so that she might prove herself again. Meanwhile, her best friend Toycie is a straight-A student, but she has begun to have problems of her own: Toycie's boyfriend Emilio has abandoned her just as Toycie has begun to suspect she is pregnant. Beka struggles to keep up with her urgent studies and be there for her friend at the same time; while Beka re-commits herself and grows, Toycie begins to fall irrevocably apart.

I've been doing this project, in which I am trying to read a book from each country, for about a year now. Beka Lamb is just the kind of book you hope will appear when searching among small and less developed countries like Belize. Not because it's especially good--it is, but nothing earth-shattering--but because it captures something indelible about the country, its land and customs, its palpable essence. If you stop to reflect, you might begin to suspect that a book like this one is written consciously for outsiders, in the way it scrupulously records the cuisine, the rituals, the music and dance, of Belize, but when such things are done with expertise, it hardly bothers you. Beka Lamb is set at a time of great tumult for this small country: many are advocating for full independence from their British rulers, and others are fretting that an independent Belize will be gobbled up by its neighbor Guatemala. (Among other things, it is odd from an American perspective, which sees it as a relatively small and poor country, to think of Guatemala as a predatory power.) But of the country's vibrancy and pride Edgell leaves no doubt.

Beka Lamb is a tragedy: Toycie's child dies in childbirth, and Toycie becomes mentally unwell. She spends some time at an asylum, but her grandmother chooses to take her into "the bush" where she can rest, but a sudden hurricane ends Toycie's life. These final consequences are spelled out at the beginning of the book, as Beka holds a mental "wake" for her fallen friend; it's suggested that, through her struggle to support Toycie, Beka is finally allowed to grow. The symbol of this growth is that she wins an essay prize at school, claiming victory over older--and non-black--girls. Such tradeoffs, Toycie for an essay prize, are difficult to swallow. But in the end, Edgell suggests that to grow and prosper as a young girl in a proud but beleaguered country is no easy thing.

With the addition of Belize, my "countries read" list is up to 73!