Stroszek & Norwood
An essay about Charles Portis, plus a little extra
I wrote about Charles Portis for The New York Review of Books.
As usual for me, I came in long and had to make cuts. Mostly that’s for the good. It was a great edit.
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But I had to ‘kill a darling’, an extended comparison of Portis’s first novel to Werner Herzog’s warmest film:
Here’s the extra:
“Norwood is slippery, even by the standards of Portis’s later work. Though in content it might seem the least adventurous of the books, its incongruities and elisions make it nearly avant-garde. It has a weird twin, in fact, in Werner Herzog’s film Stroszek, from 1977. Both tales feature an idiot-savant musician set on a surreal journey in a bizarre American landscape. These journeys are in both cases kicked off by encounters with a prostitute and her villainous pimp, personages who, by contrast, highlight the saintliness, the protective instincts, and almost total sexlessness of the eponymous protagonists. Both of these saintly musicians gather around themselves motley impromptu “families”, though Stroszek’s is destined to bleak failure, while Norwood’s finds cozy sanctuary. Both stories also feature fortune-telling chickens imprisoned in arcade machines.”
