A Glorious Gift for Gab
By Walter Clemons
[
A review of Dog of the South, by Charles Portis,
Transcribed by Alex T. Moore from Newsweek (July 9, 1979), 
for non-commercial use on The Unofficial Charles Portis Website 
(http://charlesportis.cjb.net).
]

Raymond E. Midge's wife, Norma, has run off from Little Rock with her 
first husband, Guy Dupree, taking Ray's Ford Torino and credit cards and 
leaving in exchange Guy's dilapidated 1963 Buick Special: "I had found it 
in my slot at the Rhino Apartments parking lot, standing astride a red 
puddle of transmission fluid," Ray reports.  
 
Ray is a methodical fellow. Some people - Norma, for one - might even 
find him the least bit dull. He is puzzled over Norma's defection but in no 
way doubtful that he can get her back once the credit-card billings come in 
and he's able to trace the lovebirds' path across Texas and over the 
Mexican border: "The last position was the Hotel Mogador in San Miguel 
de Allende, where I drew a terminal cross on the map with my draftsman's 
pencil an shaded it to give an effect of depth. The last receipt was just 
twelve days old. Our Mexican friends have a reputation for putting things 
off until another day and for taking long naps but there had been no 
snoozing over this bill. I looked at Dupree's contemptuous approximation 
of my signature on the receipt. On some of the others he had written 'Mr. 
Smart Shopper' and 'Wallace Fard'." "The Dog of the South" is Charles 
Portis's first novel since "True Grit" eleven years ago, and it's a beauty. 
Ray Midge's stoic pursuit takes him beyond Mexico to British Honduras. 
He carries a cargo of useless savings bonds and his wife's silverware, 
which he didn't like to leave behind in case of burglars. He picks up along 
the way an elderly disbarred M.D. who owns a hippie bus, The Dog of the 
South, and hopes to reach Honduras, which his mother runs a Christian 
mission with a dismally low record of conversions.  
 
'RAT FACE': Ray Midge cannot be insulted. A huffy Canadian artist who 
wears metallic-silver coveralls and makes paper rabbits ("He showed me 
one and it was a pretty well-done bunny except for the big eye-lashes") 
tries to offend him but fails: "He got up and flounced out, stopping for a 
moment under the archway as he thought of something pretty good to call 
me, which was 'rat face.' He thought it was pretty good but it was old stuff 
to me, being compared to a rat. In fact, I took more like a predatory bird 
then a rat but any person with small sharp features that are bunched in the 
center of his face can expect to be called a rat about three times a year."  
 
Midge's voice is precise, persnickety and daintily convinced of its own 
sweet reasonableness. His narrative is a classic piece of American gab, in 
the line of Ring Lardner's "The Golden Honeymoon" and Eudora Welty's 
"Why I Live at the P.O." Intent and absorbed, Midge is gravely certain we 
will find every detail of his absurd junket interesting and each of his 
decisions logical. And so we do. He is a perfectly wonderful creation, and 
reading "The Dog of the South" is like being held down and tickled.