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GRINGOS By Charles Portis Simon & Schuster, $18.95
It's been a long time since Hemingway wrote his last book. Manly books about manly men living meandering, manly lives are less plentiful than they used to be. In Gringos, Charles Portis serves up a dose of masculine Meso Americana.
Mexico is often a writer's shorthand for the exotic, passionate world we North Americans can't muster on our own. Gringos' Mexican setting offers an easy psychic geography. Spin this same yarn about rural Georgia, or Idaho, and Gringos falls like a dead duck. Unfortunately, the atmosphere of Mexico's steamy southern highlands doesn't save this book. Blue collar in atmosphere, catatonic in tone and with only the dimmest sense of purpose, Gringos is a passionless, sluggish read.
The narrator, Jimmy Burns, is a part-time bounty hunter and raconteur...