The Dog of the South

"Dog of the South doesn’t really add up to much, plot-wise. The plot of the book is the protagonist following his wife who has run off with her first husband. He goes after them, mainly to get the car back. I don’t think he ever catches up with them, but it’s an amazingly funny chronicle of his adventures on the road. In one chapter he goes on for several pages about a deer head mounted above a bar along the way, and whether the deer is degraded by the cigarette dangling out of its mouth – he wants to stand on the bar and slap it out. So the protagonist is narrating the comic scenes that play out in his head as he drives down to Mexico. I don’t agree with that. Ron Rosenbaum likes making pronouncements, doesn’t he? I saw him taking credit for Steve Jobs recently. Comic novelists make profound statements in the context of their writing. Portis is a great stylist and he deals with interesting issues, but I wouldn’t call him any more profound than Jasper Fforde, who wrote The Eyre Affair books, or Max Barry who has written a number of books including Company . These are guys who do great work, but you don’t ever see them being lauded. The Ron Rosenbaum essay you’re quoting brought Portis out of obscurity. I agree he’s a great writer. But to say that he’s a great comic writer and profound is almost redundant. You kind of have to be profound to be a great comic writer."