Walking on the Moon

Many people whose opinions I respect have said good things about Charles Portis’s True Grit. There are also those two very different movies, both of which I like for different reasons. So let’s see the original.

From the movies, I knew the general plot, but Portis’s novella is beautiful in its own right. He looks at the post-Civil War west through the eyes of a precocious teenager bent on revenge. The first trick he pulls is somehow making that point-of-view character believable. It’s a hard character to sell. A teenage kid driven enough to want simple bloody revenge on her father’s killer while simultaneously being competent enough to move the world to do it is a challenge for a writer.

He writes from the kid’s point of view so deftly that the reader can see what an unusual child she as well as how showing her inexperienced understanding of the world. I said “the kid” there, but she’s drawn so vividly I feel like I need to say her name – Mattie Ross – as if she were real.

Portis does a great job portraying her youth in that there are things she only understands in a shallow way, but that shallowness rings true. You can tell she knows people will try to take advantage of her, but she’s ready for it in ways that make more sense to a child. You can tell she understands she’s dealing with bounty hunters who are working outside the law, but she doesn’t understand entirely what that means.

Making your central character reveal their limitations in those ways without realizing she’s doing it is one thing, but showing the reader what she’s not seeing is more impressive.

Portis does allow himself the out that Mattie is telling the story as an adult, but that is just another source of unreliability in his narrator that he’s playing deftly.

It’s a story about desperadoes in the Old West. Truth and justice are slippery concepts. Portis plays with them in a way that lets the reader in on that. And he tells a rollicking yarn with outsized characters while he’s at it.

Strongly Recommended.

I picked this up because John Scalzi mentioned that Sherri Tepper does some great world-building in Grass. I like Scalzi’s writing, so I gave this a look. I agree with Scalzi that the world she creates and how she introduces readers work brilliantly. The characters in that world and how it drives them to grow make it a great book all around.

The world of Grass is an extrapolation of ours that heightens the aspects that Tepper wants to talk about and elides the ones she doesn’t. One of the ways that works is that she makes the parts she wants to talk about so intriguing that the reader forgets about what’s missing. Religion is there in a big way, and I found that picking at how much of it she is extrapolating it from Mormonism, Catholicism, or something caught my attention. And then sects within the church pop up with the inherent intrigue and I’m thinking about how all that meshes. None of which is really the aspect of the religion that she wants to focus on, bit its all engaging until she does get to her point.

Tepper brings us into the world through several characters’ views of it in ways that both show the reader the world and the characters. Good writers who are writing from the third person across their cast are usually aiming to do that, but I think Tepper is really doing it well. There’s a double shell game going on here where each the events each character is telling the reader what they know about the world and how they think and feel about those things. And she is author is deftly choosing the events that tell us about the characters and how they are changing. Or are not changing.

Tepper writes a book that makes this all happen for a reader. I think it’s built to be magical, even though it wasn’t magical for me. It’s not one of my favorite books, but I can tell it’s someone’s favorite. It’s worth a look to see if it’s one of yours.

Strongly recommended.