Portis in a Storm : GRINGOS <i> By Charles Portis (Simon & Schuster: $18.95; 237 pp.)</i>

A member of an audience (so I had to say something) asked me recently what writer I would be if I could be any one besides myself. I didn’t want to say “Chekhov,” because he is dead. First I said “Philip Roth, because he lives with Claire Bloom,” but when that response was taken as insufficiently literary, I said, “Charles Portis.”

I have no idea whom Charles Portis lives with. Furthermore, I would be hard-pressed to argue that Portis has achieved comedy as high as “The Ghost Writer” or as low as “Portnoy’s Complaint.” But I believe that Portis, after he finishes a book, is entitled to chortle quietly but profoundly to himself--not smugly, though--in a way that I deeply envy him. If he could chortle in that way with Claire Bloom, then. . . .

At any rate, I am eager to read anything Portis writes because of the way he makes me chortle, to myself and with nearly everyone whose sensibility I hold dear. “Norwood,” his first novel, is too good to talk about with people who haven’t enjoyed it already. “True Grit,” his second and best-known novel, is full of great rhetoric (“I will come down on you like a hundred-weight of brick”) and real rattlesnakes. Although “Dog of the South,” his third novel, does not live up to its inspired opening, no one should die without having read it.

“Masters of Atlantis,” his fourth novel, sustains intense ludicrousness so calmly--so distractedly, almost--that I have just now thrown my hat in the air, thinking about it. In “Masters of Atlantis,” one of the characters--a man, British, an adept of Gnomonism (a belief-system that cannot be explained parenthetically)--is named, aptly (aptly is putting it too flatly, and yet not strongly enough), Sydney Hen.

Now we have Portis’ fifth novel, “Gringos,” set in bad-news Mexico. Because it makes room for explicit contemporary viciousness and bloody homicide, it is less funny than the aforementioned books, but it is still Portis all over. No picturesque writing, no insistence that the narrator’s grasp of things is compelling. Also no nonchalance. Portis writes the way airline pilots would talk to you if they weren’t mostly automatic, if they were their own mechanics, if they leveled with you, and if they lacked affectation. As ever, we get the impression that Portis has personally negotiated all the terrain:

“Limbs whacked against my windows, I moved forward at a creep, but even so my poor truck was twisted and jolted about by rocks and bony roots. The glove compartment door flew open. Screws were backing out of their holes and nuts off their bolts. I had to hold my hand on the gearstick to keep it from popping out of gear. I saw a wild pig, a black squirrel as big as a house cat, darling green parrots. You don’t expect parrots to be accomplished fliers, but they go like bullets.”

The narrator is Jimmy Burns, an expatriate ex-Marine, a reformed illegal antiquities dealer, who says of himself, “Being a facetious person I got no credit for any depth of feeling,” and who calls himself “a geocentric.”

“We keep trying,” Burns muses as he recalls jumping from rock to rock on a bad knee in a desolate stream, “but none of us, not even the high-jumper slithering over his crossbar, ever gets very far off the earth. And yet we come down hard.” In the midst of devious enthusiasts and self-serving theoreticians, Burns is skeptical yet genuinely interested. Matter-of-factly pursuing a dangerous rescue mission, he engages in this exchange with an ecstasy-seeking girl who is wearing blinky lightning bugs in her hair, tied on with thread:

“Share the wonder, bring a friend.”

“Most people wouldn’t want bugs in their hair.”

“Share the wonder, bring a friend.”

But that exchange is much nicer as you come to it in the book. I was not being facetious when I said what I said above about “Norwood.” This book isn’t quite that good, but close enough to it that I am going to conduct the rest of this review as if we were talking about “Gringos” after we’ve both enjoyed it. But in case you haven’t yet, don’t worry, I’m not going to give anything away.

Although there are no more signs of outright sexual feeling or activity in “Gringos” than in any other Portis novel, didn’t you have an intimation, almost as soon as she was introduced, that Burns fancied you-know-who?

What would it be like if “Gringos” were nonfiction and Portis were the first-person narrator, instead of Burns? In that case, it probably wouldn’t work as well as it does here, when Burns mentions finding out that his friend Doc described him to a prospective employer as “a pretty good sort of fellow with a mean streak. Hard worker. Solitary as a snake. Punctual. Mutters and mumbles. Trustworthy. Facetious.” Burns imagines that the prospective employer must have wondered how anybody could be both trustworthy and facetious. The challenge of the comic novel.

Don’t you suspect there is a bit of Portis in the minor character Mott, who was told by VA doctors that he “had whatever the opposite of paranoia is called. He thought everybody liked him and took a deep personal interest in his welfare. But then everybody did like him”? And also a bit of him in Art and Mike, who “said taking an intellectual woman into your home was like taking in a baby raccoon. They were amusing for awhile but soon became randomly vicious and learned how to open the refrigerator”? It suits Portis’ purpose that neither of these remarks quite fits Burns.

If this were another chapter in the life of the sweet-natured Norwood, would things have gotten as violent as they do in “Gringos”? Might have--an older Norwood, dealing with meaner people. It appears that Portis still believes in the Western hero, with bark on but decent. A Portis hero will give people more credit than anybody else would give them, and yet he is strong of purpose. Remember how humanized John Wayne was in the role of Rooster Cogburn, in the movie of “True Grit”? Won him his only Oscar.

What do you think this book ought to win Portis? Nothing, probably; he’s better than prizes.