Customer Reviews

Gringos: A Novel

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Disclaimer: This is my first Portis read, so I have no basis for comparison.

That being said, this is one of the most enjoyable reads I can recall. All the other Amazon reviewers have it right: it is a wonderful menagerie of characters as sized up by the narrator.

What I can add to the list of reviews is the striking parallels to Conrad's Heart of Darkness. You have an odd-job protagonist who, along with is unique travelling companions, goes on a strange journey into the Mexican jungle to search for a missing friend. Along the way, he encounters excesses in human behavior, archeological adventurers, cultists and hippies. At the end of his journey, he finds a self-styled Captain Kurtz-like character: a self-imposed spiritual shaman-cum-criminal. Note that this is not the character that the protagonist is tracking down, but it does lead to an unexpected climax. Of course, the journey really isn't the point to the novel. The point is to capture all the colorful personalities along the way - Portis succeeds marvelously!

The one constant in a Charles Portis novel is the tone: dry, deadpan, but never condescending. Often the tone serves as a buffer between the characters and the harsh, arbitrarily violent world around them. In Portis's first novel, _Norwood_, the strategy is largely successful, though in Portis's second and most famous novel, _True Grit_, violence assumes a fundamental place in the narrative.

Portis's latest novel, _Gringos_, about a group of American expatriates in Mexico, may be his most disturbing yet. Although it begins slowly, introducing us to a seemingly random menagerie of locals, dropouts, and hippies, the novel builds to a brutal, unforgettable climax in the remote Mexican jungle.

_Gringos_ is alternately funny and brutal, yet leaves an unexpectedly sweet aftertaste. It's a rollicking, adventurous masterpiece from one of America's finest living novelists.

I have just completed a frenzy of reading Charles Portis novels, and I had found them all to be very good or very funny or both until I stumbled and almost fell with Gringos. This is one of those books you read and think everyone else understands but you because there really is a lot going on: there are a lot of characters, a wiley protagonist, and Portis got good blurbs on the back jacket. But I didn't get it, not this time. The characters are all classic Portis-wacky and larger than life yet still very real somehow-and the quest is classic Portis too, a journey into the jungle in search of an ancient Mayan codex, UFOs, space aliens, hippie outlaws, and runaway children. I mean, how can you go wrong with a plot like that?

The dialog is not as snappy as other Portis novels, and the characters (so many of them this time that I couldn't keep up) did things for reasons that I wasn't able to follow. I suspect that with a second read, additional details will pop out to make Gringos more intelligible. So if I "get it" with a second reading, I'll dial back in and change my rating.

When I recently stumbled across The Dog of the South by Portis, I felt an excitement much like I felt when I came across Richard Russo's Straight Man at a bargain rack. Here was a great comic novelist I had never heard of, and I couldn't wait to get my hand on more of his work. Well, Gringos covers some of the same ground as Dog of the South (DOTS), but in this reviewer's opinion it lacked much of the humor, direction and cohesion of the earlier work, and I labored to finish it.

The book takes place entirely in Mexico, amid small towns and ancient Mayan ruins being picked over by salvage dealers and hippies along for the ride. Unlike DOTS, which had a handful of very real and distinctive characters, Gringos is chock full of characters who do nothing to really distinguish themselves, and so about 100 pages in the reader starts to confuse Rudy, Roland, Doc Ritchie, Doc Flandin, Eli, Skinner, and a bunch of other male characters, together with a similar slew of unmemorable females such as Gail, Louise,Alma and Beth.

Narrator Jimmy seems to have as little purpose as humanly possible in life - he makes his living doing odd jobs, stumbling across valuable artifacts and selling them, and working on archeological expeditions but whenever he is given the opportunity in the novel to make money, (ie recover a reward), he refuses the money. He cares more about his truck's welfare than his own. He shows no interest in the opposite sex, and kind of falls into a marriage which is convenient because the woman cooks well and wakes up around the same time each day. He goes through the action in the novel with a very knowledgeable, but cool detachment, unlike the hilarious fastidiousness demonstrated by Portis' narrator in DOTS.

The main action in the novel concerned an expedition down a great river, to an ancient "holy" site where misinformed teenage beatniks seem to be converging, as our characters search for a missing planner named Rudy Kurle. For no great reason, Jimmy and a handful of followers risk life,limb and liberty to find casual aquiantance Rudy deep in the jungle, and when it appears they have no hope of finding him they decide they are really looking for a teenage runaway girl from Florida, who was briefly mentioned earlier in the novel. In fact, the bizarre reappearance of characters throughout the novel got a little ridiculous, since our characters kept running across others they had met earlier in the book, in remote areas, as if the entire country of Mexico was the size of Philadelphia. If an old buddy comes to him with a new wife, of course it is some girl Jimmy (and ther reader) had come across 200 pages earlier. The first 50 pages introduced us to more characters than we can remember, and they all seem to keep reappearing.

There is some wry humor in the book, and Jimmy is a pretty reliable, if not charismatic, narrator. I just miss the whole noble purpose behind DOTS, where our narrator pursued his wife, her lover and his Ford Torino to Central America, on the trail of their credit card receipts. Here the whole novel seemed like a largely pointless tour through Mexico's roads less travelled, and while Portis playfully lampoons hippies and gringos seeking UFO landing sites, he never really hits the funnybone in Gringos. He is a talented writer, but this is certainly not his best work.

Jimmy Burns is an ex-Marine, an ex-dealer in stolen pre-Columbian artifacts, and an American expat living the simple life deep inside Mexico in a little town called Merida. He does manage to make a living using his old beat up truck to do small hauling jobs to the jungle for archaeologists and others seeking to exploit the country's buried past, but he is easily distracted. Jimmy enjoys his down time and is not overly concerned about his future, contented to take life one day at a time.

While he may be an idler, Jimmy does care about the people closest to him and he has a keen sense of the absurd. This is a good thing since his little corner of Mexico is about to be invaded by some of the most absurd Americans imaginable, a group of hippies and slackers who barely know where they are, much less why they are.

Gringos centers around Jimmy's search for Rudy Kurle, a young man for whom Jimmy feels responsible after allowing him to wander away from a dangerously isolated dig site. Jimmy's search takes him and his crew to an ancient holy site just when dozens of the worthless hippies converge there in expectation of some major revelation. Here the search grows complicated, and changes focus entirely, when Jimmy is forced to rescue two children who will not otherwise survive the night's weirdness.

Gringos is one of those novels that suffer from a lack of likable characters to such a degree that it is difficult to care what happens to any of them, including the novel's supposed hero/narrator. The whole novel, at times, seems as tired and pointless as the lives led by its characters, making its ending, in which Jimmy unresistingly drifts into the next phase of his life, unsurprising.

Readers captivated by the renewed interest in Charles Portis novels (following the recent success of the movie remake of True Grit) will want to take a look at Gringos since Portis has written so few books. I would, however, suggest that they might want to read this one after having first sampled other Portis novels.

Gringos was the first Portis novel I read; though nowhere does it approach, say, the perfection of the first few pages of Norwood, it remains, in some ways, my favorite of Portis's five novels. In Gringos, as in all his novels, Portis communicates to us the narrator's extraodinary compassion for a cast of misfits and losers. In the end, then, Gringos doesn't show showcase its author's justly-praised comedic gifts. It's also deeply moving.

Gringos is one of my favorite novels, ever. Period. Jimmy Burns has got a great deadpan voice and a sharp eye, like the detective heroes of Chandler, etc, and though there is danger in his path, much of the charm of this book is found in his reactions to the eccentrics and crackpot "Gringos" and others he meets as he tries to do what he must to make a living and be a man of his word. Portis is the best, one of my all time favorite American writers, an heir to Twain and Chandler and a precursor to younger, more experimental voices like Donald Antrim and Brock Clarke. Also conveyed is a sense of how the "ex-pat" like can be for Americans living in Mexico at a certain time. Highly recommended! I hope he comes out with another novel or two, I am reading everything i can find by him; I have become a real "Portishead."

For someone looking for a straight up Adventure novel look elsewhere you will be bored. This book is not plot-centric but character-centric. The exciting adventure portion takes up 10-25% percent of the book. The real meat of the story is about the eccentric characters who surround this small mexican town and their interactions and how they change the main character, Jimmy Burns. The book is humorous but not laugh out loud funny. It will but a smile on your face. I could see it made into a great movie by the Coen brothers.

Actually, I saw a review of this book in GQ and I decided to pick up a copy from Amazon for some summer beach reading. To my suprise, having never read a Charles Portis novel, I have been entralled by this book. It's written for a wide audience and it's written quite well. The story of expatriot Jimmy Burns is quite interesting and a real page turner. This novel lends it self to be an easy and worthwhile read albeit there are a few instances you may want a Spanish-American dictionary but non of the Spanish really detracts from the read.

I discovered Charles Portis when I recently read "True Grit". He is a very engaging author, and very humorous. I love his use of local dialect in his writing. Having recently been to Cancun, I found his description of it during the '60's to be very informative and fun to read about. Easy, fun read!