Telling Shaggy-Dog Stories  
By G. L. (GENE LYONS)  
[
General praise of Charles Portis,
Transcribed by Alex T. Moore from Newsweek (September 30, 1985), 
for non-commercial use on The Unofficial Charles Portis Website 
(http://charlesportis.cjb.net).
]

Just when a critic thinks he has a handle on Southern writing, along comes 
someone like Charles Portis. Not only does the 51-year-old Little Rock 
author bear little resemblance to any other writer of the region; none of his 
previous books -- "Norwood," "True Grit" and "The Dog of The South" -- 
have much in common either. Now comes "Masters of Atlantis," by far the 
oddest of Portis's peculiarly and terribly funny novels. "Masters of 
Atlantis" is about as "Southern" as the Cone of Fate, the Night of Figs, the 
Codex Pappus and the other loony rites of the fictive Gnomon Society that 
animate its characters. "Masters of Atlantis" revolves around the efforts of 
one Lamar Jimmerson to propagate gnomonism in America after falling 
under its hermetical spell in Europe during World War I. Like all Portis 
characters, Jimmerson is a harmless, lone demento,just as all Portis plots 
save one -- "True Grit" -- have shaggy-dog aspects. "Anything I set out to 
do," Portis says, "degenerates pretty quickly into farce. I can't seem to 
control that." "Masters of Atlantis" reads like a Monty Python tale as told 
to Mark Twain -- though Portis's deadpan delivery is less immediately 
engaging than in his 1979 novel, "The Dog of the South."  
 
Everybody in Arkansas who reads anything besides the newspapers and 
the Bible has read Portis, who quit his job as a London reporter for The 
New York Herald Tribune in 1964 to try his hand at fiction. Yet very few 
people at the Little Rock taverns where he enjoys the occasional late-
afternoon libation recognize one of America's finest comic writers. A 
bachelor, Portis is a famous raconteur among his circle of old friends but 
shuns publicity and refuses to be cast in the role of the artist as seer. It was 
only after a friend's car was robbed, he reports with typically 
self deprecating humor, that he realized the true value of his work. "They 
took everything," Portis says. "Old envelopes, a broken screwdriver. . . but 
they didn't touch 'The Dog of the South.' They were probably right. If they 
hadn't heard of it, what were the chances it was any good?"