The American West--True Grit by Charles Portis

Introduction

It's a commonplace to state that we “love” a book, but when we say it, we actually mean all sorts of things. Sometimes we signify only that we have read a book once and relished it; sometimes we signify that a book was significant to us in our youth, though we haven't selected it up in years; sometimes what we “love” is an impressionistic concept glimpsed from afar (Combray… mad-eleines… Tante Leonie…) as opposed to the know-how of wallowing and plugging through an actual text, and all too often persons claim to love publications they haven't read at all.

Discussion

Then there are the publications we love so much that we read them every year or two, and understand passages of them by heart; that cheer us when we are ill or miserable and not ever fail to amuse us when we take them up at random; that we press on all our friends and acquaintances; and to which we return a fresh and afresh with undimmed eagerness over the course of a lifetime. I believe it goes without saying that most publications that engage readers on this very high grade are masterpieces; and this is why I accept as true that factual Grit by Charles Portis is a masterpiece.

The contribution of factual Grit is uncomplicated, and as pure in its way as one of the Canterbury Tales. The unfastening paragraph groups up the premise of the novel dignified and economically:

“Persons do not give it credence that a 14-year-old girl could leave home and proceed off in the wintertime to avenge her father's body-fluid but it did not appear so odd then, whereas I will state it did not happen every day. Iwas just 14 years of age when a coward going by the title of Tom Chaney shot my dad down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and stolen him of his life and his equine and $150 in cash cash in addition to two California gold parts that he conveyed in his trouser band.”

The speaker is Mattie Ross, from scream shire beside Dardanelle, Arkansas, and the time is the 1870s, soon after the municipal war. Mattie leaves her grief-stricken mother at home with her younger siblings and groups out after Tom Chaney, the chartered man who has slain her father. (“Chaney said he was from Louisiana. He was a short man with fiendish features. Iwill tell ...