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cartoonmicah 's review for:
True Grit
by Charles Portis
Wow. An absolute rarity of page-turning genre story in a really remarkable literary voice. True Grit is mesmerizing for its compelling Wild West landscape and thought provoking in its narration and period tone.
When 14 year old Mattie Ross finds out her father has been murdered in cold blood by a man he hired out of kindness, she determines that she will do whatever it takes to see that he is brought to swift and severe justice. Traveling on her own and strategically outwitting her minders and those she does business with, she settles her fathers affairs and begins to look for someone with authority and “True Grit” who will help her track down the criminal, someone prone to shoot first and ask questions later. And she will find that person in a rotund, walrus-mustached US Marshall who once rode with Quantrill. She will find that person in Rooster Cogburn.
This book would be pretty good for its story and pacing alone. It would stand high among thrilling genre novels of Wild West action. But what is truly impressive about True Grit, what makes it a timeless masterpiece, is the incredibly consistent and pervasive voice of the narrator, the shrewdly religious old spinster Mattie Ross. Portis gives her a straightforward no-nonsense attitude that caused regular digressions within the story that somehow work to its advantage. The reader wants to hear Mattie Ross get on with the action but never minds it when she randomly begins to digress into the history of Arkansas politics or the Bible verses which support her perspectives on law. She speaks of murder and violence and hard living without pause, but she hammers home her own convictions of what is justice and ethical in business, law, and religion. She expects foolishness from humanity (men?) and lives as best she can (as an intentionally single woman) to bring financial and legal and philosophical order in the midst of a chaotic western world.
Read it once and I suspect you’ll want to read it over and over again.
When 14 year old Mattie Ross finds out her father has been murdered in cold blood by a man he hired out of kindness, she determines that she will do whatever it takes to see that he is brought to swift and severe justice. Traveling on her own and strategically outwitting her minders and those she does business with, she settles her fathers affairs and begins to look for someone with authority and “True Grit” who will help her track down the criminal, someone prone to shoot first and ask questions later. And she will find that person in a rotund, walrus-mustached US Marshall who once rode with Quantrill. She will find that person in Rooster Cogburn.
This book would be pretty good for its story and pacing alone. It would stand high among thrilling genre novels of Wild West action. But what is truly impressive about True Grit, what makes it a timeless masterpiece, is the incredibly consistent and pervasive voice of the narrator, the shrewdly religious old spinster Mattie Ross. Portis gives her a straightforward no-nonsense attitude that caused regular digressions within the story that somehow work to its advantage. The reader wants to hear Mattie Ross get on with the action but never minds it when she randomly begins to digress into the history of Arkansas politics or the Bible verses which support her perspectives on law. She speaks of murder and violence and hard living without pause, but she hammers home her own convictions of what is justice and ethical in business, law, and religion. She expects foolishness from humanity (men?) and lives as best she can (as an intentionally single woman) to bring financial and legal and philosophical order in the midst of a chaotic western world.
Read it once and I suspect you’ll want to read it over and over again.