True Grit

I believe I picked up this Charles Portis Western at the suggestion of my esteemed colleague from Tejas. May his cowboy hats always be filled with ten gallons of whisky! Of course as loyal readers know, I often enjoy long, complex, and cerebral fiction. But sometimes you want for just a good old fashioned story well told. True Grit is a page turning action and adventure novel from beginning to epic climax. I think one of the most important aspects of this type of compulsive readability is the way an author controls the pace. Too many brawls and explosions in a row and the story turns into Batman 14: The Beating of Wings Will Continue Until Morale Improves. But too little or too subtle action and you end up reading Withering Heights. Novelists with a great sense of pacing (eg. Dostoevksky, Tolkien) seem to create a kind of fractal structure, where acceleration and deceleration sit alongside one another at all scales. Portis seems to have acquired this same knack of constructing multiple climaxes spaced so artfully that the story simply carries you along without your even realizing how it works.

What’s really unique to this novel, however, is not the good storytelling, but the peculiar voice of the narrator. There are other novels that use the trope of a child narrator to great effect (eg. The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn and The Good Lord Bird). In competent hands, this device can create a distance from the customs of the times that allows the author enough perspective to examine those customs without coming off as overly political or moralistic. Portis partially avails himself of this effect by having his story narrated from the first person perspective of a 14 year old girl. With this, he creates a flat and unsentimental look at some of the savagery of the Reconstruction era South; for young Mattie Ross, this ‘Wild West’ is just normal life. In this case, however, Portis takes the device a step further, because the story is actually narrated by the 40 year old spinster that little Mattie will eventually become (I trust it is not a spoiler to disclose that the first person narrator survives her youthful misadventure). We are not reading the reflections of an untutored girl, but those of a prim and churchgoing old maid. It’s this that accounts for the peculiarity of the voice, which alternately evokes our humor, sympathy, admiration, and boundless annoyance. It also adds another layer of indirection the story, since we more easily form an opinion about the character of an adult narrator, rather than treating them as something of a blank slate. The only comparison that comes to mind is the narrative tension that Percival Everett creates by retelling the adventures of Huckleberry Finn through the eyes of James. Though the final effect is completely different here, as it leads us to confuse rather than cleanly separate the two narrative perspectives. But this confusion is a key aspect of why the novel works so well.