On the Trail with an Arkansas Traveler

That will-o’-the-wisp, the great American novel, at least in the modern period, almost inevitably features an automobile. The fatal plot twist of The Great Gatsby is triggered by Gatsby’s car hitting and killing Tom Buchanan’s mistress on Long Island, with Buchanan’s wife, Daisy, at the wheel. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road narrates long car trips across the continent, during which its slightly fictionalized author rides shotgun while his friend Neal Cassady is in the driver’s seat. Kerouac himself couldn’t drive. And can you picture F. Scott Fitzgerald changing a tire? Somehow we expect a member of the literati to be an English-major type and not to know about things like carburetors and head gaskets. But when it comes to the American novelist and humorist Charles Portis, the situation is different. Portis, whom the critic Ron Rosenbaum called “our least-known great novelist,” died in 2020 and has now had his work collected in a Library of America volume. He was also as much at home under the hood of a car as he was with character and plot.