The search for the lost keys is at the heart of Portis’s subsequent two novels as well. In Masters of Atlantis, a secret society founded by a con artist and his gullible dupe comes to be a source of genuine meaning and faith for half a century of devotees (with the suggestion that all secret societies pretending to esoteric knowledge, from Skull and Bones to the Masons to the CIA, are the products of collective self-delusions). In Gringos, a beautiful, intense, comic-phantasmagoric novel, it’s the search for the Inaccessible Lost City of Dawn somewhere in the Mayan rain forests that draws, like a magnet, all the lonely and dispossessed, the mad romantics and con artists of the States, to seek out what is missing from their lives by going Below the Border to search for the indecipherable truths encoded in the Mayan hieroglyphics.
Rereading Portis is one of the great pure pleasures—both visceral and cerebral—available in modern American literature. Except it’s really not available to those who aren’t Portis Society initiates (who have squirreled away multiple copies of Masters of Atlantis in locked trunks to ensure a lifetime supply). It is a crime and a scandal, it’s virtually clinically insane, that Portis’s last three books are out of print and not in paperback—almost as inaccessible as the lost works of John Selmer Dix. Some smart publisher will earn an honored place in literary history and the hearts of his countrymen by bringing out a complete and accessible edition soon—now.
Meanwhile, I can’t stop thinking about Dr. Symes and Dix. What is it with all those Dix impostors, those shadowy half brothers with their little Dix museums in Trailer Review? Are they real or figures of Symes’s Dix delirium? Is the proliferation of Dixes a way of expressing the notion that we’re all, in some way, Dixes, hauling around locked trunks containing the inaccessible, unimaginable secrets we hide from one another? Perhaps Portis could tell, but Portis isn’t talking, at least not to me.
—RON ROSENBAUM, 1998
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
True Grit
Norwood
Masters of Atlantis
Gringos
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
EDITOR’S NOTE
Afterword
Charles Portis, The Dog of the South
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