Hapless Americans Adrift in Mexico
By Dan Cryer
[
A review of Gringos, by Charles Portis,
Transcribed by Alex T. Moore from Newsday (January 14, 1991), 
for non-commercial use on The Unofficial Charles Portis Website 
(http://charlesportis.cjb.net).
]

Set fictional Americans down in another country and 
they're likely to be fools, louts or innocents. Consult your 
Twain, James, Hemingway or Robert Stone.  
 
The hapless American expatriates adrift in Mexico in 
Charles Portis' "Gringos" are fools one and all. For all the 
chuckles he inspires, the author of "True Grit" has blood on 
his hands this time. Consider Rudy Kurle. He's a New Age 
type on the lookout for "ancient television receivers, pre-
Columbian Oldsmobiles, stone carvings of barefooted 
astronauts strapped into their space ships."  
 
Minim is "a retired bowler and sports poet."  
 
Emmett is "perhaps the only person ever to come to Mexico 
seeking relief from intestinal cramps."  
 
"Doc" Flandin is writing, despite his suspect scholarship, a 
thousand-page tome on the history of Meso-American 
civilizations.  
 
Frau Kobold, nee Alma Dunbar of Memphis, writes 
anonymous threatening letters to the man who delivers her 
cookies.  
 
Dan, a hippie guru with a biker build, laments, "You don't 
know how hard it's been. Finding the true path." His path 
has included theft, kidnapping and attempted murder.  
 
Jimmy Burns, whose first-person narration introduces this 
parade of eccentric misfits, describes, with eyes more 
innocent than wry, the strange goings-on about him in the 
Yucatan. He is a banal shell of a central character, though. 
We know next to nothing about him. Background, 
motivation or expectations of the world that would allow us 
to care are all missing.  
 
Consequently, Jimmy's wanderings seem conceived purely 
to offer glimpses of characters far more interesting. Like the 
characters themselves, the novel can't do more than drift. To 
call it a picaresque is to dignify a dismaying lack of 
structure.  
 
Jimmy makes a living out of his pickup truck, doing odd 
jobs and hauling cargo here and there. His work takes him 
into the jungle, where there are more Americans, it seems, 
than inhabit Rhode Island: anthropologists of dubious 
pedigree; scavengers on the lookout for fake pre-Columbian 
artifacts salable to the naive; old-style Mormons and New 
Agers hip to pyramid power, and hippies of every variety.  
 
Jimmy's ventures into the wild seem to crop up without 
rhyme or reason. Dan and his band of lost souls threaten 
him. His buddy Refugio, the junk dealer, tries to sell him 
worthless goods. Rudy gets lost and needs finding. The 
ailing Doc wants to make one last trek into the "field" for 
close contact with Mayan ruins. A band of hippies gathers to 
await Doomsday.  
 
Most of Portis' characters, alas, are cartoons wholly summed 
up in a sentence or two. Only Refugio and Doc are vividly 
drawn - Refugio as a cunning tradesman, full of impish spirit 
and bargaining guile; Doc as an intriguing mixture of self-
pity and self-aggrandizement.  
 
About all we know of the elusive Jimmy comes from a letter 
of recommendation Doc once wrote: "Jimmy Burns is a 
pretty good sort of fellow with a mean streak. Hard worker. 
Solitary as a snake. Punctual. Mutters and mumbles. 
Trustworthy. Facetious."  
 
What we see, rather than are told, is the hard work and 
punctuality. But he is almost never alone, seems not to have 
a single mean bone and his facetiousness toward the 
oddballs around him is tempered by his willingness to 
consort with them.  
 
Occasionally, we do reap the benefit of Jimmy's wit. 
"Things had turned around," he remarks of the brisk trade in 
indigenous art, "and now it was the palefaces who were 
being taken in with beads and trinkets." And cultural 
relativism merits this dismissal: "In the Anthropology Club . 
. . you were permitted, if not required, to despise only one 
thing, and that was your own culture, that of the West. 
Otherwise you couldn't prefer one thing over another."  
 
Portis has been down these roads, thematically and 
structurally, before. In his previous novel, "Masters of 
Atlantis" (1985), he made sport of a weirdly old-fashioned 
New Age religion. His Gnomons were a cross between 
Masons and Rosicrucians. And a loose-knit picaresque 
architecture, with comic characters in quest of something or 
other, governed his first novel, "Norwood" (1966); his 
second and most famous, "True Grit" (1968), and the next, 
"The Dog of the South" (1979).  
 
"Gringos" is sufficient evidence that Portis ought to light out 
for new territory.  
 
The novel is comic in the Vonnegut or Brautigan mold, if 
only fitfully so; frisky as a spaniel, but less entertaining, and 
whimsical to a fault.