Norwood

Charles Portis arrives

Norwood by Charles Portis

When Norwood Pratt’s parents die, he is given special dispensation to leave the Marines and to travel home to the middle of nowhere in the American South, because he has a sister who is fat and slow and who can’t look after herself.

Norwood goes, and takes over their old home; and he gets a job working as a mechanic. His sister screams and cries when he tells her she ought to get a job, but then she does get a job (a job as a waitress in a hotel or a cafe or something). And she takes to the job, and then marries in short order a tedious magazine-reading regular of her cafe, or the hotel her cafe is in. He quotes things to her that he’s been reading in the magazines. She believes, because he can read things out to her, that he must know a lot about the world. And so they are married.

Norwood finds this difficult. His new brother-in-law is unbearable. He moves in with Norwood and Norwood’s sister. The two of them (they have their marriage license framed and placed above their bed) make Norwood’s life more and more miserable.

And Norwood is hassled by something. At first, it’s just the footloose and fancy free disease. He wants to go somewhere where the TV and the radio programmes are made so he can appear on a show singing and playing his guitar. He wants to be a country star, like a man named Hank. No, not Hank Williams. Hank Williams is dead. Norwood means, and wants to be like, another Hank. A Hank who isn’t dead.

There’s another thing. Another thing that bugs Norwood. He’s owed seventy dollars. Owed seventy dollars by a friend from the Marines. And the guy flaked out on him, ran away to New York or somewhere else. Didn’t give the money back and did his best to be uncontactable. For Norwood, the uncollected debt is more than he can stand. He tells his sister and his brother-in-law about it every night. They pontificate and tell him that he oughtn’t to have leant the money or he ought to have got it back by now. Or, just possibly, it’s too small an amount for someone with a job at the Nipper garage to care all that much about.

And finally Norwood decides to go. He is out at the skating rink (roller-, not ice-) and he bumps into the worst possible person to meet at a low ebb in your life. Grady Fring, the Kredit King. A disbarred lawyer, a man who sells things by mail order. A scoundrel, an awful rat. And he has a job for Norwood to do.

Not a difficult job. Just a job.

I sell cars, you see, Fring tells him. And I want you to drive one of them from here to New York. The market is hotter in New York. You just drive a car there and I’ll pay you fifty dollars, plus expenses. Plus expenses

And Norwood, because his domestic situation is not ideal, agrees. Only to be told that there are two marvellous surprises for him when he goes to pick the car up. The first is that he’ll actually be transporting two cars, not one (the one attached to the other by a tow rope); and the other is that he’ll also be taking a sulky woman with him. She’s Miss Phillips, and is destined to go north, too.

Norwood and Miss Phillips don’t get on. He gets her to throw syrup and tinned peaches all down her dress by braking the car so she can see some wildlife.

She screams at Norwood. I thought you’d be interested, he says. Wrong.

And he gets her head mashed by braking too hard a second time, so hard she hits her head on the ceiling. After that, it’s an armed truce, and Miss Phillips decides to ruin Norwood’s life. She waits until they’ve just crossed the state’s border and she informs him that now, if there’s any justice, he’ll end up in federal prison. After all, he’s just transported two stolen cars across state lines. That’s the interstate commerce clause for you, baby.

It’s a bitch.

Disgusted, Norwood ditches the cars in the middle of nowhere and sees the last of Miss Phillips. He’ll go to New York: oh yes he will. But he’ll go his own way and for his own reasons alone. Norwood is going to get those seventy dollars.

He’ll ride the rails and be almost suffocated by loose flour in a railway carriage full of sacks of the stuff. He’ll have his boots stolen right off his feet. Boots worth more than half of the value of the debt he’s trying to collect. And he will end up fighting his fellow hobos, and hitch-hiking with some very shady characters, and when he gets to New York, things will not go precisely as Norwood hopes or expects.

This is a very strange book. It’s restrained, deadpan. It’s so subtle that the humour arrives with great suddenness. As Norwood is hitch-hiking, for instance, he is picked up by an autistic bread delivery driver in his lorry. When another hitcher is also picked up, the second man offers up a brief story about going all the way to a far-off hospital to visit his wife, who was born, he says, without sweat glands. Presumably she is very ill. ‘“I never had a cold in my life,” said the bread man.’

I must say, that really made me laugh. If that’s the kind of thing you like, you’ll enjoy this very strange little book. If not, I don’t know what to tell you.