The Dog of the South

Ray Midge’s wife has run off to Mexico with her ex-husband, taking Ray’s car and credit cards, so Ray does the only sensible thing and follows the trail of gas receipts south. This is Portis’s pure comic road novel, and for many devoted readers it is the one they love most.

Why Consider This One

Choose this if you want the essential Portis experience distilled. There is barely a plot, just a fool on a mission and the parade of talkers, schemers, and lunatics he meets along the way, chief among them Dr. Reo Symes, a broke con man with a head full of get-rich-quick fantasies and one of the funniest characters in modern fiction. The pleasure is not in where Ray is going. It is in every conversation he stumbles into.

The Dog of the South shows what Portis does when he is not bound by the forward pull of a revenge story. The humor is drier, the digressions richer, the whole thing gloriously shaggy. Readers who come to Portis through True Grit and want to understand why he inspires such cult devotion usually find their answer right here.

What to Expect

A loose, meandering, deeply funny trip in which almost nothing important happens and every page is a delight. Expect long comic monologues, useless expertise deployed with total confidence, and a narrator too oblivious to notice he is the joke. Slower than True Grit by design, and worth surrendering to.