A Funny Adventure and a Meditation on Revenge: Three Reasons You Should Read True Grit

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Many books I love are hard to recommend because they’re either:

1. hundreds of pages long
2. loosely plotted
3. full of historical/pop culture/philosophical references that require footnotes or a separate companion to make sense of
4. narratives involving sexual assault in some way
5. narratives with massive amounts of violence
6. experimental and considered too out there by some people
7. all of the above

However, there is one book that fails to meet any of these disqualifying criteria. That is Charles Portis’s classic 1968 Western True Grit. I recommend the novel to everyone above the age of twelve no matter what profession you hold or how much money you make.

The title may be somewhat familiar to you. The Coen brothers’ 2010 film adaptation of the novel introduced many more people, such as myself, to the novel whose literary cult status has grown so large it is now fairly well-known. (And rightly so.)

The plot of the story is pretty straightforward. Set in Arkansas in the 1870s, True Grit tells the story of a fourteen-year-old girl named Mattie Ross whose father was recently killed by the renegade Tom Chaney. With the help of the meanest U.S. Marshal she can find, Mattie Ross heads west into Indian Territory to find Tom Chaney and bring him to justice. Joining the two on their journey is Mr. LaBoeuf, a Texas Ranger, whose pursuit of Tom Chaney for different reasons complicates the three’s collaboration with each other.

So why should you read it?

1. It can make you laugh or at the very least smile. Charles Portis has a droll, deadpan sense of humor that gives off a steady glow. You can open the book to almost any page and find something amusing. Portis has an ear for voice that makes the dialogue and narration — really the whole book — a joy to read.

“By God!” said he. “A Colt’s dragoon! Why, you are no bigger than a corn nubbin! What are you doing with that pistol?”

I said, “It belonged to my father. I intend to kill Tom Chaney with it if the law fails to do so.”

“Well, that piece will do the job. If you can find a high stump to rest it on while you take aim and shoot.”

2. It contains one of the most memorable voices in American literature, that of the narrator Mattie Ross. She is a self-righteous, prim, pitiless, resolute, and humorless fourteen-year-old girl. A flawed character, she is charming in how unselfconscious she is and how willing she is to appear absurd in order to bring Tom Chaney to justice. You can see how unshakeable she is near the beginning of the novel when she negotiates a deal with an auctioneer over horses worth $325 (about $7,000 today when adjusted for inflation). In crafting an authentic voice for Mattie Ross, Portis wrote the novel as if it were her first-hand account written twenty-five years after the novel’s events. Her account includes scripture quotations, digressions, and advice she assumes you the reader will take. There’s a kind of stiff formality in her deadpan narration that seeps into the dialogue of other characters. It’s a funny and clever way to reveal what she thinks of them.

LaBoeuf said, “She is not going anyhow. I don’t understand this conversation. It is not sensible. I am not used to consulting children in my business. Run along home, little britches, your mama wants you.”

3. It is more than just a western. Dispel any notion you may have of the story being little more than an exciting account of gunslingers and shootouts, tough sheriffs and lone cowboys. The philosophical and metaphysical ideas in this novel give it the thematic weight of a Greek tragedy. Mattie Ross and the two men she collaborates with (the U.S. Marshal and the Texas Ranger) all have different motivations for finding Tom Chaney, which shine a light on the hazy differences between justice and revenge. The trio’s differences highlight Mattie Ross’s self-righteousness, something that makes this comic story also deeply moving as a tragedy. The story transcends its genre in the sense that it’s a tragedy that reveals the true, personal cost of revenge. Westerns with vigilante justice often explore the idea that exacting revenge results in collateral damage. It never works out as tidily as we’d hope it would. Portis shows in True Grit how revenge can devastate a person in ways beyond what’s obvious.

You must pay for everything in this world one way and another. There is nothing free except the Grace of God. You cannot earn that or deserve it.