Shelf Life -- Scott Dickensheets: Sniffing out mysterious meaning of 'Dog of the South'

Scott Dickensheets' books/magazine column appears Fridays. Reach him at 990-2446 or [email protected]

I'm thinking I might accuse author Charles Portis of textual harassment. His novel "The Dog of the South" (Overlook Press, $14.95) has been working me over pretty good, albeit in a peculiar way. I'm certain this is a great book, but I'm having trouble putting my typing finger on why, and it's making me crazy.

Long out of print, the book has achieved life after remaindering thanks to a quixotic crusade by writer Ron Rosenbaum. In columns for Esquire and the New York Observer, Rosenbaum championed Portis (best known as the author of "True Grit") as America's least-known great writer. It's a "a crime and a scandal," he thundered, that Portis' tour de force, "The Dog of the South," was unavailable in bookstores.

Overlook Press accepted Rosenbaum's challenge and the rest is my puzzlement. "Dog" is the story of Ray Midge, whose wife Norma has run off with that scoundrel Dupree in Midge's beloved Torino. Following a trail of their credit card receipts, Midge pursues them in Dupree's lemony Buick. He tracks them to Mexico, where he picks up a traveling companion, Dr. Reo Symes, a con artist and defrocked medical man.

This oddest of couples heads to Honduras, where Midge hopes to corner his wife and Dupree, while Symes wants to visit his mother in her Honduran mission, to scam her out of some family property. Symes is obsessed with one John Selmer Dix, a fabled, reclusive, now-dead author of inspirational books for salesmen, who, Symes believes, has happened onto essential insights into the human dilemma.

They have various minor adventures, Midge locates Dupree and his wife, Symes, his mother, that's it! I'm still not clear on what it all means. Like certain books by Don Delillo and Thomas Pynchon, this one gives you the sense that hidden profundities flow like subterranean rivers beneath the comic-picaresque surface.

Clues to meaning are scattered and tantalizing. The title comes from a phrase painted on Symes' broken-down bus. What the hell does that mean? The narrative is full of old men with one festering eye, the last of which is almost surely the elusive Dix, although that goes unremarked. It's enough to make a guy wish he'd stayed awake in his upper-level lit classes.

Rosenbaum considers Symes "one of the great con-man fabulists in American literature," and posits the bad doctor's fascination with the author Dix as the heart of the story. Rosenbaum argues that Dix represents our desperate, eternal belief that amid our lives of failed schemes, crushed hopes and unanswered questions, someone has Worked It All Out. That answers are, indeed, possible.

It's certainly plausible. I mean, Rosenbaum's undoubtedly right. But I think I've finally put my finger on why I enjoyed the book so much, and it has little to do with any of that. It's about why I read fiction.

I enjoy nonfiction as highbrow hard copy, for the kick of learning about a new patch of the real world. But I consider fiction a fitting room: a place to try on new identities, new points of view. And in narrator Midge, Portis has created one of the endearingly quirky personalities I've encountered recently. He's obsessive-compulsive, probably; unreliable, surely; completely nuts, undoubtedly -- and one of a kind, utterly. Let's end with a blaze of excerpts:

Here's Midge, in a bar: "When the beer came, I dipped a finger in it and wet down each corner of the paper napkin to anchor it, so it would not come up with the mug each time and make me appear ridiculous. I drank from the side of the mug that a left-handed person would use, in the belief that fewer mouths had been on that side."

Or in Honduras, having found Norma and Dupree: "Now I was ready to make my move ... I inspected the hood for cat tracks and I had a look underneath."

Cat tracks! His thoughts are full of such loopy specificity. Contemplating his age (26), he muses, "Places like Idaho had governors my age."

Midge's oddball conciousness is, it goes without saying, a strange and wonderful place to spend time. It's rare that I say this, but it's true enough in this case: I wish the book had been longer, even if I can't tease every last meaning from it.

Reading list

It's not all fun and games, however. Elizabeth Gilbert adds some emotional depth with her profile of player Chris Spielman and his wife, Stefanie's, battle with breast cancer. And Elwood Reid weighs in with a story about coach Bo Schembechler's son, Matt, who says Bo don't know fatherhood.

It's all more than enough to keep true believers busy through the long, dark days of preseason, until the real action starts.

Some other guy wrote a book about life and death in Winnemucca -- that's how bad it's getting.

What's next?

Plenty! A preview:

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