Jonathan Lethem’s new essay in the New York Review of Books, “Grand Poobah of the Antigrandiose” explores the work of novelist Charles Portis, and highlights the work of Robert Cochran’s new book Haunted Man’s Report: Reading Charles Portis.
“Now comes the University of Arkansas English professor Robert Cochran’s Haunted Man’s Report: Reading Charles Portis,” Writes Lethem, “a loose portrait of Portis’s life and times wrapped around a study of the work. Cochran repudiates “tedious anatomizing” and promises instead “as ‘Portishead’ a volume as possible—this is the aim. Appreciation, a fan’s notes. Of a wiseacre sort.” For all the disclaimers, Cochran’s volume gathers a great deal of scrupulous research, and even some portion of psycho-biographical speculation, into a persuasive close reading of five novels, plus journalism, a short story, and Portis’s single stage play. Cochran brings to light both the sidelong historical ruminations and the sorrowful depths of feeling that admirers have always sensed moving beneath the picaresque plots and the insouciant breezes of Portis’s prose.”
Robert Cochran’s Haunted Man’s Report is a pioneering study of the novels and other writings of Arkansan Charles Portis (1933–2020), best known for the novel True Grit and its film adaptations. Hailed by one critic as “the author of classics on the order of a twentieth-century Mark Twain” and as America’s “least-known great novelist,” Portis has garnered a devoted fan base with his ear for language, picaresque characters, literary Easter eggs, and talent for injecting comedy into even the smallest turn of phrase. As a former Marine who served on the front lines of the Korean War and as a journalist who observed firsthand the violent resistance to the civil rights movement, Portis reported on atrocities that came to inform his fiction profoundly. His novels take aim at colonialism and notions of American exceptionalism, focusing on ordinary people, often vets, searching for safe havens in a fallen world.
Haunted Man’s Report, a deeply insightful literary exploration of Portis’s singular and underexamined oeuvre, celebrates this novelist’s great achievement and is certain to prove a valuable guide for readers new to Portis as well as aficionados.
Robert Cochran, professor of English at the University of Arkansas, serves as editor of the University of Arkansas Press’s Arkansas Character series. He is the author of Vance Randolph: An Ozark Life and A Photographer of Note: Arkansas Artist Geleve Grice. Haunted Man’s Report is his first work of literary criticism since Samuel Beckett: A Study of the Short Fiction (1991).