Masters of Atlantis by Charles Portis (review)

MR Lost Classic Beginning in this issue, The Missouri Review inaugurates our Lost Classic review series, featuring reviews of great books that, for one reason or another, never got the attention they deserved. Look for more reviews of underappreciated works in future issues. Masters ofAtlantis by Charles Portis Overlook Press, 2000, 272 pp., $14.95 (paperback reissue) You might think that after Ron Rosenbaum's essay "Our LeastKnown Great Novelist" appeared in the January 1998 issue of Esquire, Charles Portis, the author in question , would be, if not a household name, a name recognizable at least to many writers. But mention Portis to most writers, and you're likely to be met with blank stares—that is, until you mention True Grit (1968). Yep, ifs the same True Grit that was made into a movie starring John Wayne and Glen Campbell, and ifs the reason Td lumped Portis in with Zane Grey, Max Brand and Louis L'Amour, writers I had no interest in reading. The fact is, Portis doesn't write Westerns. He writes hilarious and quirky quest novels. The backdrop of Portis's best-known quest novel, True Grit, just happens to be the turn-ofthe -century West. Portis, born in El Dorado, Arkansas , in 1933, is the author of five novels, beginning with Norwood in 1966. His most recent novel, Gringos, was published in 1991. Die-hard Portis fans tend to cite his midcareer novels, The Dog of the South (1979) and Masters ofAtlantis (1985), as their favorites, and it is not uncommon for these fans to proclaim one or the other as the funniest book they've ever read. In my opinion, the award should go to Masters ofAtlantis. At the heart oíMasters ofAtlantis is Lamar Jimmerson, a member of the American Expeditionary Forces in France during World War I, who is duped into believing that he has been initiated into a secret society called the Gnomons and conned into buying the society's book of secrets, the Codex Pappus. In his quest to understand all of the Codex Pappus's often impenetrable secrets, Jimmerson brings the book back with him to the States and appoints himself Master of the Gnomons, a role he takes with the utmost seriousness, gaining, over the course of some sixty-odd years, a number of loyal devotees and detractors. The narrative hurtles along, following the varied courses of these secondary characters, whose own personal quests become the comic force of the book. Among this cast of second bananas is Cezar Golescu, metallurgist, member of every known secret society in the world, and expert on the lost continent Mu. Golescu displays his genius by demonstrating how he can write, take dictation, and add columns of numbers with both hands at the same time. He teams up for a while with Austin Popper in a get-richquick scheme of turning common soil into gold. Popper, the Gnomons' PR man extraordinaire, is on the run from the group's most vehement detractor, FBI agent Pharris White. The Missouri Review · 189 White travels the country with Jimmerson's "Rod of Correction"— a small brass rod "you couldn't correct a dwarf with"—which White stole from Jimmerson in a D.C. hotel room. With an extensive file, compiled over forty years, on both Jimmerson and Popper, White is hoping to put both men away for good. Though Masters ofAtlantis is full of absurdities—men who wear tall, cone-shaped hats called Pomas; a talking blue jay named Squanto; Popper's plan to win World War II using compressed air—Portis is not of the same absurdist camp as, say, T. Coraghessan Boyle. Unlike Boyle, Portis does not achieve laughs by nudging the reader. He's a master of deadpan, even in the novel's quieter moments, as when Jimmerson gets his hands on a mailing list titled "Odd Birds of Illinois and Indiana," which contains "the names of some seven hundred men who ordered strange merchandise through the mail, went to court often, wrote letters to the editor, wore unusual headgear , kept rooms that were filled with rocks or old newspapers. In short, independent thinkers. . . ." One could easily imagine such a list written...