No One Could Keep the Whole of That Lecture in His Head at Once, Such Are Its Riches
It has, for one thing, a great opening paragraph:
My wife Norma had run off with Guy Dupree and I was waiting around for the credit card billings to come in so I could see where they had gone. I was biding my time. This was October. They had taken my car and my Texaco card and my American Express card. Dupree had also taken from the bedroom closet my good raincoat and a shotgun and perhaps some other articles. It was just like to pick the .410 -- a boy's first gun. I suppose he thought it wouldn't kick much, that it would kill or at least rip up the flesh in a satisfying way without making a lot of noise or giving much of a jolt to his sloping monkey shoulder.
The speaker is smart in some ways, not so smart in others. As narrator, he is not so much unreliable as profoundly clueless about his effect on other people. He has accumulated enough college hours to have earned a couple of bachelor's degrees. But he has never stayed in a single course of study (or a single university) long enough to get a diploma. It was while at Ole Miss that he studied"the Western campaigns of the Civil War with Dr. Buddy Casey."
Which leads us to a passage I've been flashing back to, amidst the debates over military history at National Review Online and Cliopatria.
Without making any pretense that it contributes at all to that exchange (and at the risk of pushing fair use pretty far, given the length of the passage) let me now quote in full the narrator's tribute to Professor Casey's approach to military history:
For a long time I had a tape recording of his famous lecture on the Seige of Vicksburg and I liked to play it in the morning while I was shaving. I also played it sometimes in the car when Norma and I went for drives. It was one of those performances --"bravura" is the word for it -- that never become stale. Dr. Bud made the thing come alive. With nothing more than his knuckles and the resonating sideboards of his desk he could give you caissons crossing a plank bridge, and with his dentures and inflated cheeks and moist thick lips he would give you a mortar barrage in the distance and rattling anchor chains and lapping water and hissing fuses and neighing horses. I had heard the tape hundreds of times and yet each time I would be delighted anew by some bit of Casey genius, some description or insight or narrative passage or sound effect. The bird peals, for instance. Dr. Bud gives a couple of unexpected bird calls in the tense scene where Grant and Pemberton are discussing surrender terms under the oak tree. The call is a stylized one -- tu-whit, tu-whee -- and is not meant to represent that of any particular bird. It has never failed to catch me by surprise. But no one could keep the whole of that lecture in his head at once, such are its riches.
I said I"had" the tape. It disappeared suddenly and Norma denied that she had thrown it away. After making a few inquiries and turning the apartment upside down I let the matter drop. That was my way.
See also prominent literary blogger Maud Newton's response upon first reading Dog, as recorded here.
For more on Charles Portis, see my short essay on his fiction so far. There's also this item on another Portis classic, Masters of Atlantis.