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Justin Difazzio's avatar

I do love a good road trip novel. The first novel I ever wrote was a road trip novel. It's flawed and broken, but I still love it.

I'm currently reading A Month in the Country and GREATLY enjoying it. The narrator is delightful, and I'm curious where the story is going.

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Frank Dent's avatar

For would-be novelists out there, Portis is a good one to study. Take a look at that almost perfect opening paragraph you quote above. Portis was a journalist, and he gives us most of the who-what-when-where-why stuff. But note how he also generally avoids the use of unnecessary ad-words (adjectives and adverbs) in this first paragraph, until the very end that is, when he nails Dupree with “his sloping monkey shoulder.”

Portis’s other novels would probably be better known if he hadn’t written an almost perfect one in True Grit. How do you follow that? The voice in True Grit is so distinctive and so American that it’s no wonder two film adaptations were made of it. Yet few people seem to know there was a novel behind the films.

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