127 reviews for:

Norwood

Charles Portis

3.78 AVERAGE


Phenomenal. I don't really know what to say. I've been struggling to find a novel lately that completely captured my attention and pulled me fully into its world. This one did the trick. Norwood hooked me from the first page and never let go. The characters are quirky without being stupidly over the top. The dialogue is wonderfully Southern without being overwrought. It's a perfect little novel you really could read in a single sitting. It took me two sittings.

One thing that struck me about this novel I must say is its prodigious yet fascinatingly casual use of the 'n-word' for a book published in 1966. I nkow the book is set in the mid-1950s, but I still found it to be a bold (but to my mind certainly not racist) move during the ascendancy of the Black Power movement. It certainly would have been the way these characters would have talked--and it's fascinating to see the moments when certain characters stray from the word. I'm trying to imagine this book on a reader's nightstand with Stokely Carmichael on the evening news. Maybe it didn't even register at the time, but I have to say it struck me in its historical context of a literary book from the mid-1960s.

Highest recommendation. Charles Portis is a badass. Please write another book.

A short road trip story with some interesting characters and a generous sprinkling of dry humor. A little too slight to get a 4th star from me, but an excellent for a first novel.

Kaleb Horton's Portis obit for Slate is worth reading: The American Anthropology of Charles Portis.

My only contention is that Norwood isn't his best novel. Start with Dog of the South then go to True Grit or Masters of Atlantis.

Summer 2020 has turned into the time that Charles Portis came and stayed with us for a while. My husband and I are reading everything we can get our hands on by him and about him.
Norwood is a relatively short and uncomplicated jewel compared to some of the other Portis books. It is gentler in its humor than The Dog of the South, and isn't the epic of True Grit.

Loved it. Just right.

From Charles Portis' official fan site: "Portis delivers to us obsessive, often humorless eccentrics that produce unself-conscious monologues over the course of fruitless quests, all in a deadpan tone that doesn't give so much as a wink to the reader."
Yep. That's it. Absolutely dry and wonderful. I loved it.

Norwood, a high school dropout just out of the Marines, decides to go to New York to collect $70 that he had loaned another marine. On the way he meets a woman whom he might marry whose dream is to own a trailer, and a midget who borrows most of his recovered money. This was a fun, easy to read and unpredictable novel.

Clearly a first novel. Portis' voice and humor made me want to rate it higher, but couldn't because of the plotting. I Read it on the kindle and I wondered if parts of the text were missing. But, perhaps worth a quick breezy read to fill in the Portis oeuvre.