Review: True Grit
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.