Ten Years in the Tub (110 page)

“Norwood” is Norwood Pratt, a marine who obtains a hardship discharge so that he can return to Texas to look after his incapable sister Vernell. Vernell promptly marries an unlikable disabled veteran called Bill Bird, however, thus liberating Norwood to go to New York, partly in an attempt to reclaim seventy dollars that an army friend owes him. So
Norwood
is a road-trip book, and the simplicity of its structure allows for a dazzling range of eccentric minor characters, and plenty of room for any number of terrific, short, often crazily pointless passages of dialogue. Here's Norwood, on a bus, trying to engage with a two-year-old called Hershel Remley:

            
“I believe the cat has got that boy's tongue,” said Norwood.

            
“Say no he ain't,” said Mrs. Remley. “Say I can talk aplenty when I want to, Mr. Man.”

            
“Tell me what your name is,” said Norwood. “What is your name?”

            
“Say Hershel. Say Hershel Remley is my name.”

            
“How old are you, Hershel? Tell me how old you are.”

            
“Say I'm two years old.”

            
“Hold up this many fingers,” said Norwood.

            
“He don't know about that,” said Mrs. Remley. “But he can blow out a match.”

There's so much to love here: the portrayal of the clearly slow-witted toddler, Mrs. Remley's desperate and hopeful pride, the author's merciless ear for disastrous parental anthropomorphizing… This is the third novel I have read by Charles Portis, and I am now completely convinced that he's a neglected comic genius. And here's a cool fact: in Nora Ephron's new book of essays,
I Remember Nothing
, she talks about dating Portis in the '60s. The relationship clearly didn't last, but it feels as though their children are everywhere anyway.

Tom Rachman's
The Imperfectionists
, which I suspect you may have read already, is an ingeniously structured work of fiction that manages to tell the
entire history of an English-language newspaper based in Rome through a series of linked short stories about its members of staff. This to me makes
The Imperfectionists
a collection rather than a novel, despite the bald assertion on the cover (“A Novel”), and I slightly resented being misled, for entirely indefensible reasons; in most ways I haven't aged at all over the last quarter of a century, remarkably, but I seemed to have developed some kind of old-geezerish resentment of story collections. Is that possible? Is resentment of short fiction a sign of aging, like liver spots? And if it is, then why? As the end of one's life draws closer, surely one should embrace short fiction, not spurn it. And yet I was extremely conscious of not wanting to make the emotional effort at the beginning of each chapter, to the extent that I could almost hear myself grumbling like my grandmother used to. “Who are these people, now? I don't know them. Where did the other ones go? They'd only just got here.” It's a great tribute to Rachman, to his sense of pace and his choice of narrative moment, that within a couple of pages I had forgiven him. And the world of the expatriate is, it occurred to me halfway through the book, rich with fictional possibilities; almost by definition, the characters are lost, restless, discontented—just the way we like them.

I feel that I cannot leave before explaining some of the more baffling choices in the Books Bought column. Lawrence W. Levine's
Highbrow/Lowbrow
was, along with John Seabrook's
Nobrow
, a recommendation from a reader who felt it might help me with some of the difficult issues raised by Carl Wilson's essay on Céline Dion; the book about Ronald Reagan's time at General Electric I bought after watching a riveting Reagan documentary on the BBC. The chances of me reading either of them are, I suspect, slim; as is so often the case, however, I am, at relatively modest expense, intent on maintaining a risible self-delusion about my intellectual curiosity. I know way too much about James Brown already, so I'll probably choose that one next.

July / August 2011

BOOKS BOUGHT
:

     
  
Mrs. Caliban
—Rachel Ingalls

     
  
Whoops!: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay
—John Lanchester

     
  
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
—Mark Twain

     
  
The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers
—Christopher Vogler

BOOKS READ
:

     
  
Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
—David Eagleman

     
  
Ball of Fire: The Tumultuous Life and Comic Art of Lucille Ball
—Stefan Kanfer

     
  
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
—Barbara Demick