True Grit

A Perfect Small Novel

Charles Portis’s True Grit, published in 1968, is one of those rare books that is exactly as long as it needs to be and not a word longer — a perfect small novel that has been beloved by a devoted readership for over half a century and twice made into acclaimed films. On its surface it is a straightforward Western: a revenge story, a manhunt across the frontier. But what makes True Grit a genuine classic, and what every reader remembers, is its voice. The novel is narrated by Mattie Ross, looking back as an old woman on the events of her fourteenth year, and her flinty, deadpan, biblically cadenced narration is one of the great comic and literary achievements in American fiction. The plot is fine; the voice is immortal.

The story is simple. Mattie’s father is murdered and robbed by a hired hand named Tom Chaney, who flees into the lawless Indian Territory. Most fourteen-year-old girls would grieve and go home. Mattie, instead, sets out to see her father’s killer brought to justice — or to kill him herself. Shrewd, relentless, and utterly without sentiment, she negotiates a horse trade with breathtaking ruthlessness, and then hires the man she judges best suited to the job: Rooster Cogburn, a fat, one-eyed, hard-drinking U.S. Marshal with a reputation for “true grit” — and for killing the men he pursues rather than bringing them in. Joined by a vain Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf who is also after Chaney, the unlikely trio rides into the Territory on a hunt that will test all of them.

The Voice of Mattie Ross

Everything in True Grit flows from Mattie’s narration, and it is worth dwelling on, because it is the book’s genius. Portis gives her a voice of extraordinary precision and personality: prim, literal-minded, devoutly Presbyterian, obsessed with money and contracts and the exact reckoning of debts, entirely humorless in her own self-presentation and therefore hilarious on the page. She reports the most violent and absurd events in the same flat, formal, scripture-quoting register she applies to a horse trade, and the gap between her deadpan tone and the wild frontier world she describes generates a constant, delicious comedy. Yet the voice is never merely funny. It is also the voice of a remarkable person — brave, stubborn, morally certain, and possessed of the very grit she admires in Rooster — and over the course of the book it earns the reader’s deep affection and respect. Mattie is one of the great characters in American literature, and Portis creates her entirely through how she talks.

Funny, Thrilling, and Deep

True Grit succeeds on every level it attempts. As an adventure, it is genuinely thrilling — the manhunt builds to set pieces of real tension and violence, including a famous, heart-stopping climax. As a comedy, it is consistently delightful, mining humor from Mattie’s character, from the bickering of the three pursuers, and from the deadpan rendering of frontier life. And beneath the entertainment, it is deeper than it first appears. It is a meditation on grit itself — on the relentless, unsentimental will that drives Mattie and Rooster alike, on what such determination costs, on the toll the quest takes. The bond that develops between the steely girl and the broken-down marshal is genuinely moving, and the novel’s quiet melancholy — Mattie narrating from the far end of a life shaped by these events, alone and unmarried, having paid a price for her grit — gives the comedy an undertow of real feeling. It honors its heroine’s relentless will while letting us see what it cost her.

Spare by Design

Readers should know that True Grit is spare and understated. Portis writes with great economy; there is no lush description, no sweeping prose, no sentimentality. The Western landscape and the violence are rendered plainly, almost matter-of-factly, in keeping with Mattie’s own unadorned voice. Readers expecting the epic sweep of a Lonesome Dove or the lyrical darkness of Cormac McCarthy will find something quite different — a tight, voice-driven, deceptively simple book that achieves its depth through character and tone rather than scope or style. And, as a frontier novel of its setting, it contains period attitudes and language in its dialogue and world that reflect the time and place it depicts.

But the spareness is the art. True Grit is a model of how much can be accomplished with how little, of how a perfectly realized voice can carry an entire novel and make a simple revenge plot unforgettable. The two film adaptations — John Wayne’s Oscar-winning turn in 1969 and the Coen brothers’ acclaimed 2010 version — are both fine, but the novel is the richer experience, because the films cannot fully capture what is best about it: Mattie’s narration, the texture and music of her telling. The book lives in its voice, and that voice is on the page.

For readers who love distinctive comic voices, literary Westerns, or simply a perfectly made novel, True Grit is a treasure — funny, thrilling, moving, and over far too soon.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.5/5 — A perfect small Western and one of the great American comic voices. Portis’s tale of a steely fourteen-year-old and a broken-down marshal is funny, thrilling, and far deeper than its plain surface suggests. Spare by design, and unforgettable in the voice of Mattie Ross.

For more of the American frontier, see Lonesome Dove, Blood Meridian, and No Country for Old Men.