The Charles Portis Appreciation Society held regular meetings at the Library of Congress during the early 1990s. No minutes from those gatherings survive--though as I recall, sessions tended to be lively, verging on the raucous. Topics discussed fell into three broad categories.

(1) Charles Portis had published five comic novels: Norwood (1966), True Grit (1968), The Dog of the South (1979), Masters of Atlantis (1984) and Gringos (1991). All members of the Society agreed that Dog might well be the funniest American novel since Huckleberry Finn. What about the relative merits (or weaknesses) of the rest of his work? Much discussion, much disagreement.

(2) Portis lived in Arkansas, where he had grown up. By all accounts, he was something of a recluse. His books were heavily populated with misfits and knuckleheads. But what would Portis himself be like, in person?

(3) A perceptive reviewer once compared the experience of reading a Portis novel to being held down and tickled. Why didn't the American public recognize that it had a comic genius in its midst? Or to put things somewhat differently: How come the society had only three members (namely two friends plus me)?

A surprising reply to that last question arrived a couple of years ago, in the pages of Esquire, when journalist Ron Rosenbaum revealed that Portis has a sort of cult following among other writers. Nora Ephron compared him to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Of The Dog of the South, Roy Blount Jr. said, "No one should die without having read it." Yet some of Portis' best work had been out of print for years. Rosenbaum hinted that a publisher could "earn an honored place in literary history and the hearts of his countrymen" by reissuing Portis' novels.

Over the past several months that call has been answered by Overlook Press-a fitting name, come to think of it, for the publisher of a neglected genius. Handsome new paperback editions of four novels are now in the stores. The exception is True Grit, available from another press. (I have always suspected that neglect of Portis by serious literary people might have something to do with the fact that his second novel was made into a film that got John Wayne an Oscar for best actor.) Readers now have a chance to explore the whole of Portis' distinctive literary territory: a world of cranks, unsuccessful con men, and utterly naive souls adrift in a world they'll never quite understand.

The title character in Norwood, for instance, is a simple guy from East Texas who goes off to New York to collect a debt from an Army buddy. In his first novel, Portis already shows a precise ear for characters who are smooth-talking and/or sharp-tongued. (There is a memorable scene involving a laconic fellow dressed in a giant Mr. Peanut costume.) The basic template for all of his later fiction can be found in Norwood: travel plus conversation.

In The Dog of the South, the narrator heads to Central America to retrieve his estranged wife. Along the way, he picks up the enterprising Dr. Reo Symes-a man with countless money-making schemes in mind, a few of them absolutely legal. (The definitive Symes remark is, "It was a straight enough deal.") Portis has a rare gift for creating characters who are loquacious storytellers: people ready to explain their own actions and motives, at length, yet slightly less insightful about themselves than they think. In Dog, such figures abound. The novel's incredible comic energy comes from all those monologues bouncing off one another.

The same technique--what might be termed "conversational ricochet"--structures Portis' later fiction. Masters of Atlantis chronicles the birth, rise and fall of the Gnomons, a secret society devoted to ancient occult wisdom, public service and the wearing of funny hats. The novelist renders each oddball character distinctly, often sketching them with a few deft strokes, as in this portrait of an aging Gnomon bachelor: "When he found himself alone in an elevator with a pretty girl, he would smile at her with the heavy-lidded smile of an Argentine playboy, but saying nothing and meaning no harm. The girls turned away. In his spare time, he read. He kept up with medical developments and indulged a taste for esoteric lore."

The effort of such lonely souls to form a community (and the obstacles that get in the way) also shapes Gringos. Set among American expatriates in Mexico, Portis' fifth novel embodies the distinctive humor of his earlier work-though not quite as much energy. According to Ron Rosenbaum, the writer has been working on another book for the past 10 years. In the meantime, devotees can only celebrate the fact that Gringos is finally in paperback.

At the same time, we longtime Portis fanatics are bound to feel a little dubious about whether a larger audience can really appreciate the nuances of the great man's work. You don't read Portis for big ideas. He's not riding the wave of the Zeitgeist or exploring depths of the psyche. A master of small details and lopsided observations, Portis also possesses a rich sense of spoken language: the dry, sly tones of understatement, evasion, irritability and bloviation.

A case in point is the scene in Masters of Atlantis in which an FBI agent tries to round up a posse at a meeting of the Bar Association. Not all of the lawyers feel up to chasing a fugitive: "Some of the men, a sizable minority, refused to take part in the manhunt, giving as their reasons advanced age, bad weather, compromised dignity, allergies, dependent children, obesity, fear of biting insects, potential mental anguish, pain and suffering and loss of consortium, unsuitable shoes, low back pain, weak eyes, hammer toes and religious scruples."

Besides an infectious delight at the rhythms of communication in general (and excuse-making in particular), Portis shows a rare sensitivity to loners and eccentrics. He possesses much of Flannery O'Connor's humor, without any of her cruelty. Even his most addle-brained crackpots aren't really grotesque.

Which isn't to say that the novelist is a confectioner of light humor and empty sweetness. Rereading his work in this new edition, I was struck by a quality we never really addressed years ago during meetings of the Charles Portis Appreciation Society. Each novel ends on a note of sadness--never sentimental or obvious, and at times just barely audible. I had the sense of discovering a side of Portis that I'd never been able to recognize before. One more reason to thank the Overlook Press for giving him his long-delayed due.