Marine, Norwood Pratt, who travels from Texas to New York City in pursuit of a fellow Marine who owes him $70. Norwood follows a recently discharged U.S. The Funniest Book You’ve Never Heard of Is Turning 40 The Ringer Book Club: Our Social-Distancing Reading RecommendationsĬonsider Norwood, Portis’s first novel, which was published in 1966. His novels are marvelous odysseys into the dark heart of WTF. Portis loves to take people who, for one reason or another, are highly committed to their own way of seeing things, then send them on journeys just over the horizon of what their expectations can accommodate. More than that, he understands that weirdness isn’t really weirdness the perception of weirdness is only a sign that the world is larger and more varied than any one person’s ability to understand it. The novelist Charles Portis, who died in February at the age of 86, was one of the great American chroniclers of the 20th-century bizarre, but what makes his books so funny and wise is that his “normals” are every bit as particular and odd as his “abnormals.” He understands that weirdness begins at home. The people who strike us as the most surreally eccentric will see themselves, more often than not, as completely ordinary-and more than that, they will tend (but how dare they!) to see us as the really strange ones. We all seem “normal” to ourselves, because we are the fixed points in our own daily lives. More often than not, after all, the difference between the normal and the abnormal is a matter of point of view. The abnormal has no idea that it’s abnormal, and the normal has no idea that it’s bizarre. The relationship between the normal and the abnormal is a fruitful theme for comic fiction, because it captures two mutually antagonizing blind spots. Welcome to Ringer Reads, a semiregular column by Brian Phillips about his favorite books, writers, and various literary happenings.

Charlie portis