In the Review’s June 20 issue, Jonathan Lethem writes about the “anomalous” Charles Portis, “a writer force-fielded in a durable glamour of obscurity and frequently championed for revival—‘America’s most remembered forgotten novelist,’ as the writer Mark Dunbar quipped.” (Indeed, none of Portis’s novels were reviewed in our pages in his lifetime, although Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana did discuss the Coen brothers’ adaptation of Portis’s western True Grit for the website.)

On the occasion of a Library of America edition including Portis’s five novels and much miscellany, Lethem tries to identify the “sorrowful depths of feeling that admirers have always sensed moving beneath the picaresque plots and the insouciant breezes of Portis’s prose”:

Portis, if he ever tipped his hand, seemed only to care that his books be delightful. They are. Yet what if they also sustain all the claims nervously advanced on their behalf, the comparisons to Twain, Dante, Nabokov, Gogol?

Below, alongside Lethem’s article, we have compiled a selection of writing from the archives about insouciant writers with claims to greatness.

Jonathan Lethem
Grand Poobah of the Antigrandiose

In his five very different novels Charles Portis’s signature was deflation, his attention always fixed on how the world declines to make sense.

Joan Acocella
The Elmore Leonard Story

“‘All villains have mothers,’ he said.”

—September 24, 2015

Nathaniel Rich
Screwball Noir

“Barry Gifford is now more than forty years and forty books into his career, yet still no one seems to know what to do with him. Andrei Codrescu calls him ‘a great comic realist,’ while Pedro Almodóvar likens him to the Surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel…. David Lynch, who directed two of Gifford’s screenplays, Lost Highway and Wild at Heart, says that reading him is ‘like looking into the Garden of Eden before things went bad,’ which is an odd statement, given that things in Gifford’s novels tend to go very, very bad, and quickly too.”

—December 9, 2010

Pico Iyer
The Knight of Sunset Boulevard

“Philip Marlowe’s power comes from the fact that he is tilting single-handedly against the corruptions of Los Angeles and usually trying to rescue a princess in a tower suite from the squalor and compromises all around; and yet, of course, it is the woman who is usually playing him, and who proves at least as corrupt as the society around her.”

—December 6, 2007

Margaret Atwood
The Queen of Quinkdom

“Which brings us to Ursula K. Le Guin. No question about her literary quality: her graceful prose, carefully thought-through premises, psychological insight, and intelligent perception have earned her the National Book Award, the Kafka Award, five Hugos, five Nebulas, a Newberry, a Jupiter, a Gandalf, and an armful of other awards, great and small.”

—September 26, 2002

John Updike
The Passion of Graham Greene

“After his modest start as a novelist under the influence of Joseph Conrad and John Buchan, Greene’s masterly facility at concocting thriller plots and his rather blithely morbid sensibility had come together, at a high level of intelligence and passion, with the strict terms of an inner religious debate that had not yet wearied him.”

—August 16, 1990

Special Offer
Subscribe for just $1 an issue

Get the deal

Politics   Literature   Arts   Ideas

You are receiving this message because you signed up
for e-mail newsletters from The New York Review.

Update your address or preferences

View this newsletter online

The New York Review of Books
207 East 32nd Street, New York, NY 10016-6305