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A timeless classic of heroism, adventure, and coming of age that I found to be both thrilling and funny. The tale of how a 14-year old girl from Arkansas comes to avenge the murder of her father in 1878 is so pure and elegant, it can’t help but make you believe in the power of righteous determination to right the ills of the world. Told from the perspective of a straitlaced spinster decades later, we get a jaundiced eye on the human condition that puts human weakness and courage in a wonderful perspective. A personal hook for me was the setting of most of the action in eastern Ozarch parts of the future Oklahoma where I grew up.

On learning of her father’s death, Mattie leaves her grieving mother and siblings and sets out from Fort Sill, Arkansas, to collect his body. Upon learning the culprit Chaney has escaped into the lawless lands of Indian Territory, she sets about finding a man she can hire who is sufficiently mean and capable enough to find him and kill him if necessary. The man she carefully picks, Rooster Cogburn, is a middle-aged, one-eyed, fat alcoholic, but she believes he has the necessary “true grit�� to get the job done. According to the sheriff: “He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don’t enter into his thinking. He loves to pull a cork.�� When she first encounters Cogburn, he is testifying in court against a captured murderer, where the defense he has to admit killing 23 bad guys in the course of his work going after felons hiding out in Indian Territory. She has found her man.

If you have seen the first movie based on the book, you can’t help but hold the aging John Wayne in your mind for the marshall. But there was a corny outlook to that version, and the more recent Coen brothers�� movie, with Jeff Bridges as Cogburn, is closer to Portis�� tone in the novel, its absurdist flavor and deadpan humor. See this for an informative filmography (as an aside, the piece makes me wish for a Coen adaptation of DeWitt’s “The Sisters Brothers��, which appears to owe much to “True Grit��). An underground theme handled better in the second movie is the need for Cogburn to achieve some form of redemption for brutal deeds committed in the service with the infamous Quantrill Raiders during the Civil War. Mattie’s sense of Cogburn as a sort of surrogate for her lost father is also fulfilled better with that movie’s coverage of her efforts to track him down 25 years later.


Portis on the set with Wayne during the making of the 1969 film version


Jeff Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld as Cogburn and Mattie in the 2010 movie

The word that best characterizes Mattie in this story is relentless. In that way, she is in the same league with Larsson’s Salander, although she does not stray to the dark side of “Breaking Bad�� like the latter. Early in the tale, she shrewdly negotiates a contract with Cogburn, forges a scheme to accompany him against his wishes, and wangles a horse and money out of a stock trader by threatening a lawsuit against him for liability in the theft of her father’s horse by Chaney. An ex-Texas ranger, LaBoeuf (pronounced “La Beef��), horns in on their quest, seeking the large bounty on Chaney’s head for killing a state senator. Mattie provokes him mercilessly over his mercenary ways, bragging, and dandified airs. As Chaney has joined up with the bandit gang of Lucky Ned Pepper, she gives in on having an extra man on the mission. But she gets her way on joining the two through implacability that garners their respect.

When asked to ID her father’s body, we see how readily she can set aside her grieving in favor of the job she needs to do:
“I said,”That is my father.�� I stood there looking at him. What a waste! Tom Chaney would pay for this! I would not rest easy until that Louisiana cur was roasting and screaming in hell!
The Irishman said, “If ye would loike to kiss him it will be all roight.��
I said, “No, put a lid on it.��

This sample shows Portis�� mixture of plain prose in perfect declarative sentences and aptness in capturing local idioms he was steeped from his Arkansas origins. The full sentences used in dialogue is abnormal, but perhaps they could be seen as reflecting Mattie’s proper schooling as she writes from a distant future. Overall, I was totally charmed to delighted laughter with the speech he pulls out of his characters. For example, when Cogburn corners and exchanges gunfire with some thieves in a cabin, he demands to know who is inside and gets the answer: “A Methodist and a son of a bitch! �� Keep riding!�� I was particularly tickled with the floury speech of the stock trader near the beginning:.
“The killer has flown to the Territory and is now on the scout there.��
“This is what I heard.��
“He will find plenty of his own stamp there,�� said he. “Birds of a feather. It is a sink of crime. Not a day goes by but there comes some new report of a farmer bludgeoned, a wife outraged, or a blameless traveler set upon and cut down in a sanguinary ambuscade. The civilizing arts of commerce do not flourish there.��

At the end of the 2004 edition of this 1968 book, Donna Tartt explains why it is a masterpiece for her and four generations of her family:

Mattie’s narrative tone is naive, didactic, hardheaded, and completely lacking in self-consciousness—and, at times unintentionally hilarious �� A great part of True Grit’s charm is in Mattie’s blasé view of frontier America. Shootings, stabbings, and public hangings are recounted frankly and flatly, and often with rather less warmth than the political and personal opinions upon which Mattie digresses. She quotes scripture; she explains and gives advice to the reader; her observations are often overlaid with a decorative glaze of Sunday School piety. And her own very distinctive voice (blunt, unsentimental, yet salted with parlor platitudes) echoes throughout the reported speech of all the other characters—lawmen and outlaws alike—to richly comic effect.