True Grit

Fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross sets out to avenge her murdered father, hires the meanest available U.S. Marshal, and narrates the whole bloody business in a voice so sharp and self-possessed it has no equal in American fiction. True Grit is the ideal way into Portis, funny and thrilling on the same page.

Why Start Here

This is Portis’s most famous novel, and for once the fame is completely earned. Mattie’s narration, prim, biblical, relentlessly certain, is one of the great feats of voice in American literature. She is telling the story as an old woman looking back, and every sentence carries the weight of a person who decided long ago exactly what she thinks about everything. You believe her, you fear for her, and you laugh out loud, often within the same paragraph.

It is also the most accessible door into his work. The plot is a straight revenge quest with real stakes and real danger, so the pages turn fast, but underneath the adventure runs the same deadpan comic intelligence that powers everything Portis wrote. Where his other novels can feel gently aimless by design, True Grit has a spine of pure momentum. If you love it, and most readers do, the stranger pleasures of his other books will feel like a natural next step.

What to Expect

A lean, propulsive read you can finish in a couple of sittings. Expect frontier violence rendered matter-of-factly, dialogue you will want to read aloud, and a heroine who never once flinches or apologizes. It is a Western only on the surface. Really it is a character study wearing spurs, and the character is unforgettable.