Books like Gringos

Gringos isn’t exactly what I wanted from Charles Portis at this time. Yes, I realize Portis probably had his own literary agenda, but naturally I prefer mine: i.e., that he continue to write short, funny, meandering books about semi-enlightened rednecks. Gringos fits several of these bills if you want to quibble—and, as I’ve said before, you usually do—but its humor is a little more serious-minded than I wanted. I have the suspicion that all this rigmarole about crazy Americans trying to work out their neuroses and hang-ups in Mexico and Guatemala is intended to tell me something profoundly insightful about Americans—and perhaps about their childish devotion to myth, hocus-pocus, and the otherworldly because the world they’ve fashioned for themselves is so underwhelming and prosaic. But this feels too obvious, and Portis’s characters are a little too grotesque in this outing to serve as persuasive stand-ins. This is all wild speculation, of course, because I’m not really sure what Portis’s point was. But I am strongly convinced that he had one. The story is too garrulous, overpopulated, and ornamented with recurring themes to be arbitrary or haphazard. Or is it? Maybe Portis is—just as I said in a previous review—a natural-born yarnspinner, and we literarily-minded saps are always still looking for a grand, metaphysical narrative behind the scenes. This is the kind of scrupulousness that makes dullards out of us. Let the novel stand there, on its own, and speak for itself. Was it enjoyable? Maybe that should be the main question. Enjoyability captures so many qualities under its umbrella that I should be content with saying, Yes, the novel Gringos by Charles Portis is mostly enjoyable. That is enough.And yet it’s somehow not. It’s enjoyable but somewhat unsatisfying. Like if you sat down and spooned half a container of fat-free Cool Whip into your gaping maw. It lacks a substantiality that I craved right now. Gringos is, after all, Portis’s last novel—a statement implying that he’s dead, which he’s not, in the rigorous sense of the word anyway, but this novel was published in 1990, I believe. The juxtaposed evidence of his advanced age and the twenty-ones year since the publication of Gringos leads me to conclude that he’s thrown in the towel with this novel-writing business. Just call me Angela Lansbury. Writer’s Block, She Wrote. Or, worse, apathy. Discouragement. Plain old-fashioned tiredness. I wanted Gringos, Portis’s swan song, to show him at the height of his powers. But no. Of the four (of five) Portis novels I’ve read, this is probably the depth of his powers. And yet it’s good. Just not good enough. It’s the story of Jimmy Burns, an American expatriate, who used to do archaeological things (I say ‘archaeological things’ because I’m not sure if he was a genuine archaeologist or merely a ruins scavenger) but now mainly does odd jobs for people. The story focuses on an American expatriate community in Mexico predominantly comprised of wackos, UFO enthusiasts, violent cult members, hippies, and general, non-categorizable eccentrics. There are about twenty thousand characters in this three-hundred-twenty page novel, and I had a hell of a time keeping them all straight—which resulted in several anguished searches through the early pages of the book searching for characters’ names. Late in the book, Jimmy tells us that a certain character has died, and given the attention devoted to this death, it seemed to be a somewhat significant event, yet I had no recollection of who he was. The name sounded familiar though. Either this book needs an index or my mind is progressing at a brisk clip toward its grand enfeeblement.