The ‘Uniquely Southern Storytelling’ of Charles Portis The ‘Uniquely Southern Storytelling’ of Charles Portis

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The great affection afforded the writer Charles Portis has largely to do with his voice on the page—not just the southern dialects that he captured so well, but a style of uniquely southern storytelling, dripping with pathos and humor. If you don’t know his work, or know him only from the film adaptations of his most famous novel, True Grit, there’s plenty to explore.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:

The Library of America just released an edition of Portis’s collected works that brings together his five novels with select stories, essays, and journalism. Coming three years after Portis’s death in 2020, the publication gave Hamilton Cain a chance to assess Portis’s persistent appeal in an essay for us last week. I love how Cain describes Portis’s South as a “circus of the dispossessed.” The novels are teeming, he writes, “with con artists and broken farmers; carnival performers and fortune-telling chickens; cars with ailing transmissions; guns, guns, and more guns.” There is violence in this world, and a sense of desperation. But what makes Portis’s depiction of the South special, Cain thinks, is that “he sees comedy where other authors see tragedy; redemption where others see brimstone.”

The novels are deeply enjoyable, as anyone who has tried out True Grit can attest. The narration carries you along on a pleasant ramble. I had a similar feeling when I dug into The Atlantic’s archive and discovered a long autobiographical essay by Portis from our May 1999 issue, called “Combinations of Jacksons.” This is a piece of writing that demands to be read aloud (like so much of Portis) on a porch, late at night, under lamplight, maybe to the rhythmic sound of a rocking chair or the wind whistling through a nearby magnolia tree. It’s hard not to get carried away.

Portis starts by reminiscing about his own southern-Arkansas boyhood in the 1940s during World War II, and then shifts to recounting the stories of his great-grandfather, who fought as a “boy soldier” on the Confederate side in the Civil War. The tales skip and jump between Portis’s own memories and those of Uncle Alec, as everyone referred to his great-grandfather, eventually landing back with a 9-year-old Portis extolling the “summer pleasures” of Mount Holly, the town where he grew up. So many of these passages get at the musicality of Portis’s prose, but just for a taste, here’s one about his visit to a watering hole:

A leaning tree shaded the pool, and from a high limb there hung a rope with a stick tied at the end. You grabbed the stick with both hands, ran down the sloping bank, took flight, and at the peak of the upswing let go, doing a back flip or a half gainer on the way down. Some unknown person had patiently spliced the long rope together from the separated strands of a thick oil-field hawser, and hung it there for our delight. One day it was just there. With the ingratitude of children we accepted it as part of the natural order of things, as no more than our due, and asked few questions.

Portis has more in the Atlantic archives, including a few short stories from the ’90s, for anyone who’d like to stay on that porch a little while longer.

The Novelist Who Truly Understood the South

What to Read

How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water, by Angie Cruz

In 12 near-therapeutic sessions, Cara Romero, a Dominican immigrant in New York, tells her life story to a counselor at a government job-retraining program for older people. Estranged from much of her family and unemployed since the factory she’d worked at for more than 25 years shipped her job overseas, she’s baring her soul to the city employee to secure a fresh start. But the 56-year-old is also reflective and blunt as she reveals all that she’s navigated over the decades … Witnessing Cara’s story is like a secondhand catharsis. Though the novel delivers more pathos than laughs, the protagonist is unforgettable, learning and changing in her 50s, making the most of her tiny victories. For anyone facing their own dark days, it’s a profoundly encouraging experience.  — Carole V. Bell

From our list: What to read when you need to start over

Out This Week

📚 End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, by Peter Turchin

📚 Reproduction, by Louisa Hall

Your Weekend Read

Why Kids Aren’t Falling in Love With Reading

What I remember most about reading in childhood was falling in love with characters and stories; I adored Judy Blume’s Margaret and Beverly Cleary’s Ralph S. Mouse. In New York, where I was in public elementary school in the early ’80s, we did have state assessments that tested reading level and comprehension, but the focus was on reading as many books as possible and engaging emotionally with them as a way to develop the requisite skills. Now the focus on reading analytically seems to be squashing that organic enjoyment. Critical reading is an important skill, especially for a generation bombarded with information, much of it unreliable or deceptive. But this hyperfocus on analysis comes at a steep price: The love of books and storytelling is being lost.