Now the five novels, the memoir, and some short stories, essays and newspaper articles have been gathered together in one tidy volume edited by Jay Jennings, and installed where they belong, in the pantheon of American letters, the Library of America ... The greatness of Portis’s novels lies in speech—the austere locutions of True Grit, the sales jabber from various 20th-century parties, the off-kilter dialogue between solipsistic individuals, and great riffs of talk from characters in the grip of some idée fixe. The comedy is ineffable, inextricable from its context, the ready-for-anything American mindscape.
A meticulously curated new compendium from the Library of America, which collects his five novels and assorted other works, allows for a fresh opportunity to reckon with his slippery, unsettled legacy ... It’s tempting to point out the disjunction between the author’s fundamental outsider stance and his postmortem embrace by the institutional intelligentsia ... Includes a survey of Portis’s journalism, essays and other nonfiction, ranging from visceral accounts of civil rights violence in the segregated South during the early ’60s to a droll comedic essay from 1977 ... A nervous sense of inevitable, awful and profoundly satisfying violence lurks throughout. In typical Portis fashion, the novel glides to its resolution with the transporting advantage of several well-executed twists.
A new volume... edited by the Arkansas journalist Jay Jennings, gathers all these characters and more, collecting Portis’s five novels together with his short stories and some of his journalism, including the parody of an advice column that ran in this magazine. It’s absurdly fun to follow his oddballs and their odysseys, but something more than fun, too. Portis’s genius went beyond character in the strictly literary sense, to reveal something about moral character and many somethings about the character of this country.
One is constantly confronted, in Portis’s work, with the glories and horrors of the Old South ... The old ways are always being contrasted with present-day American banality, with the encroachment of chintzy commercial culture even into the hinterlands ... Of course, all of his narrators and protagonists are unreliable... this is the source of much of their humor. And humor isn’t only a byproduct in his novels, it is their universal joint, their clutch assembly.
The retrospective reveals a consummate humorist and sharp-eyed chronicler of human flaws—those deeply embedded racial, religious, and socioeconomic prejudices Portis observed in the American South, a region that he saw as a microcosm for the country as a whole ... Like McCarthy, he’s attracted to vaudevillian absurdity, but he avoids McCarthy’s moody existentialism ... He satirizes his fellow southerners, incorporating their particular dialect (including its sometimes-racist elements) into his craft, all while treating these characters with grace and even tenderness ... These set pieces may read like hieroglyphs to non-southerners, but Collected Works is a Rosetta stone, deciphering a region and a history that spans from the colonial era through slavery, Jim Crow, and the present day. A writer who saw the humor in America’s tragic past, Portis reflects the peculiarities and bigotries of the South, many of which, he seems to argue, are simply exaggerated forms of those found in every corner of the country.
