True Grit by Charles Portis

Somehow I missed this one. Actually, I’ll tell you exactly why I missed it.

Charles Portis wrote True Grit in 1968. I was six years old. The next year it was made into a film with John Wayne. The movie was very popular, made a ton of money, and earned John Wayne the Best Actor Oscar, his only Oscar. I have no interest in John Wayne. I don’t find him attractive or interesting as a man or as an actor. I remember seeing him on talk shows and variety shows when I was a kid doing his laconic cowboy shtick. I wasn’t impressed. So, because True Grit was John Wayne, I wasn’t interested, even when I later found out the movie was based on a well-regarded novel. Apparently some people who grew up in the 70s as I did had True Grit assigned to them in their high school American Lit courses along with Hawthorne and Mark Twain. I never did.

It wasn’t until the Coen brothers made their movie version of the story that I really became aware of Charles Portis and a True Grit that didn’t imply John Wayne. That was 2010. Maybe at that point I added the book to my “to be read, someday” list. Then Portis died earlier this year (in February, after several years of Alzheimer’s). His story of giving up a successful journalism career to become a novelist, then only writing 5 novels in over 50 years and shunning popularity while living in Arkansas further tweaked my interest. The final turn came when I posted about reading Remains of the Day two months ago and a friend commented that he was re-reading True Grit. Now I’ve read it, too.

Like Remains of the Day, True Grit is narrated in first person by a remarkable character. One of the many charms of the book, both books, is the narrator’s voice and what they reveal of themselves through the way they tell their story. In True Grit, the narrator is an old woman named Mattie Ross. At the time of the telling, sometime around 1920 or so, she is unmarried, lives in Arkansas, manages a bank (or maybe owns it) and takes care of her invalid mother.

The story she tells takes place sometime in the 1870s when she was 14 years old. On a trip into town to buy some ponies, her father is shot to death by a man who had been living for a few months on her family’s farm. Determined to revenge her father’s death, Mattie hires a US Marshal, Rooster Cogburn, to travel with her across the border into Indian Territory (later Oklahoma) where the fugitive has fled. Before they leave Arkansas, a Texas Ranger shows up, also looking for the same man. So the three of them set off together.

The story from there is pretty simple. And it’s a short novel. It takes the first half of the novel to get the three characters together and started on their journey. In the second half of the novel there’s a scene at a hideout (the guy they’re looking for has teamed up with an outlaw gang). Then there’s a little more tracking followed by a second encounter with the gang where they get their man. A kind of an epilogue takes place around 1903, and that’s that. But I point out the simplicity of the story only to notice how completely thrilling the story is despite being so spare.

What makes the novel so engaging is, first of all, Mattie Ross. Like no other 14 year-old girl. She is entirely unsentimental, smart, determined. Portis worked as a journalist before turning to fiction (this is his second novel) and Mattie narrates in the journalistic, just-the-facts, style. But she’s more than that. She moralizes. She quotes Bible verses. She is courageous. She is completely self-confidant. She pushes the men but also knows she needs their help and accepts it. She doesn’t back down or give up or let the two men patronize her.

The book contains two other great pleasures as well. One is that surrounding the main story, the characters also give us endless back stories and side stories in the course of their traveling and while sitting around camp fires. Never losing the forward line of the main story we also get this rich sense of the world around them and where they’ve come from. Rooster Cogburn in particular has a conflicted past, fought for the Confederacy, participated in some ugly events. The other attraction of the book is the detail of life in 19th century Arkansas farm country. This isn’t done in an overly-explaining way. Mattie simply, constantly, references obscure people and places and farm equipment and so on, that she just assumes you know about. You could look it all up, I suppose, but it doesn’t lose anything to not always get it. Instead it creates a deep sense of verisimilitude. This is exactly the way a woman so completely familiar with this world, especially a woman so sure of herself in this world, would talk about it.

Is it on the same American Lit level as Hawthorne and Twain? I say it is. A lot of people like this book. You will, too.