It is likely no surprise to readers who love the novels of Charles Portis that everything delightful about his books was delightful about him as a person. The surprise, if anything, was how closely his personality tallied with his work. He was blunt and unpretentious, wholly without conceit. He was polite. He was kind. His puzzlement at the 21st-century world in which he found himself was deep and unfeigned. And yet almost everything out of his mouth was dry, new and pungently funny.
Portis died in February. I’ve loved his work all my life — “The Dog of the South” is a family favorite, as is “Masters of Atlantis” — though the work closest to me is “True Grit,” which I recorded as an audiobook a number of years ago. I’m often asked how I came to record another author’s book; most simply, the answer is voice. I grew up hearing “True Grit” read aloud to me by my mother and my grandmother and even my great-grandmother. This was a tremendous gift, as Portis caught better than any writer then alive the complex and highly inflected regional vernacular I heard spoken as a child — mannered and quaint, old-fashioned and highly constructed but also blunt, roughshod, lawless, inflected by Shakespeare and Tennyson and King James but also by agricultural gazetteers and frilly old Christian pamphlets, by archaic dictionaries of phrase and fable, by the voices of mule drivers and lady newspaper poets and hanging judges and hellfire preachers.
Why does a story, a memory, stay with us? A few remembered scenes and images stay close to the surface, accessible and natural to write about, but some things slide deeper and only later work gradually to the surface, like an old sliver working its way out of skin.
It was that way with a story my childhood piano teacher told. Stories leaked out of her about her own childhood, sailing the world aboard her father’s clipper ship, as a reward for playing well or a sop if she’d lost her temper, as she often did with me. If I hadn’t practiced (and I never had), asking about the narwhal’s tusk above the grand piano or the famous Hundred Faces fan given to her father and mother on their honeymoon voyage to China was a useful way to use up the lesson hour.
Through decades of coups, invasions and endless war, Afghans tuned their radios to Radio Afghanistan every morning at 7 and every afternoon at 4:05 to hear the names of the newly dead.
“Ads today?” Mr. Zaki, half asleep, asked on a recent dawn after opening the door to Mr. Aziz’s knock. Outside, birds chirped and the new day’s soft light covered the peaks of the tall pine trees in the station’s compound in Kabul, the capital.
No, said Mr. Aziz, who had waited behind the door in the kind of deference saved for masters of a different era. They had gone weeks without anyone arriving at the little window — just four ads in 40 days, though certainly many more had died.
What does it say about me if a funny thought pops into my mind while reading a drug addiction memoir? Sam Lansky’s 2016 debut, “The Gilded Razor,” was almost Augustinian in its searing frankness. I felt relief, of course, at the end, when its author, utterly worn out by his addiction at just 19, had enough energy to finally hop back on the wagon. But I couldn’t help it: Lansky’s account of having consumed, as a New York City prep-schooler, such a prodigious heap of illicit substances also provoked the mental image of a midlevel cartel accountant eyeing his balance sheets, alighting upon Lansky’s name on his roster of customers, twiddling his fingers and murmuring, “Excellent,” like Mr. Burns on “The Simpsons.”
With his debut novel, “Broken People,” Lansky — the West Coast editor of Time magazine — proves himself a talented writer of fiction too: unsparingly honest, but also funny and mordant, willing to use his life and what he does to his body to comment on issues larger than himself.
“One must cross the threshold heart of words,” Susan Howe writes early in her new book, “Concordance,” an appealingly jagged sequence of collage poems. The “threshold heart,” for Howe, is a kind of echo chamber where sound dazzles the inner ear and resonance dances with meaning. To invite us into this complex space, Howe populates the pages of her new book with sliced texts and textures, pasting down items as varied as draft letters, the preface to Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “Common Law” and (yes) concordances. These collages invite readers into protracted encounters with scraps. Some of the book’s pages are just glued together slivers of dislodged indexes. This is not to say they are not also delightful.
Both Speedboat and Sleepless Nights mine their author’s experience in order to present a kind of fictional truth that is separate from the mere external facts of their lives, even as they borrow and reincorporate some of those facts. The tricky thing about autofiction is that even as it dispenses with the contrived machinery of plot and made-up characters, it usually does so only to build another kind of artifice in its place—in this case, the illusion that these carefully curated fragments are somehow more “real” or life-like than a made-up plot. In the end, even in their formal experimentalism, Speedboat and Sleepless Nights are both carefully crafted works of fiction whose art is inextricably linked to their artifice.
On guard my mother studied her
ankles & hands all the time. Any swelling
set off alarms. Everything in our home
bolted to wet silence. Our family
One grief, all evening—: I’ve stumbled
upon another animal merely being
itself and still cuffing me to grace.
I will, I will skip without your rope
Since you say I should not, I cannot
Borrow your son’s skipping rope to
Exercise my limbs; I will skip without