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By Root 510 0

recounting her story as an old woman, and Portis is such a genius of a literary mimic that the book reads less like a novel than a firsthand account: the Wild West of the 1870s, as recollected in a spinster’s memory and filtered through the sedate sepia tones of the early 1900s. Mattie’s narrative tone is naive, didactic, hardheaded, and completely lacking in self-consciousness—and, at times, unintentionally hilarious, rather in the manner of Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters. And like The Young Visiters (which is largely delightful because it views the most absurd Victorian crotchets as obvious common sense), a great part of True Grit’s charm is in Mattie’s blasé view of frontier America. Shootings, stabbings, and public hangings are recounted frankly and flatly, and often with rather less warmth than the political and personal opinions upon which Mattie digresses. She quotes scripture; she explains and gives advice to the reader; her observations are often overlaid with a decorative glaze of Sunday School piety. And her own very distinctive voice (blunt, unsentimental, yet salted with parlor platitudes) echoes throughout the reported speech of all the other characters—lawmen and outlaws alike—to richly comic effect, as when Rooster remarks austerely of a young prisoner he has brought back alive to stand trial: “I should have put a ball in that boy’s head instead of his collarbone. I was thinking about my fee. You will sometimes let money interfere with your notion of what is right.”

Mattie is often compared to her literary ancestor, Huckleberry Finn; but though the two of them share some obvious similarities, in most respects Mattie is a much harder customer than careless, sweet-tempered Huck. Where Huck is barefoot and “uncivilized,” living happily in his hogshead barrel, Mattie is a pure product of civilization as a Sunday school teacher in nineteenth-century Arkansas might define it; she is a straitlaced Presbyterian, prim as a poker. “I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains,” she says coolly to the drunken Rooster; tidy, industrious, frugal, with a head for figures and a shrewd business sense. Her deadpan manner is reminiscent of Buster Keaton: Mattie, too, is a Great Stone Face; she never cracks a smile when recounting the undignified and ridiculous situations in which she finds herself; and even predicaments of great danger fail to draw violent emotion from her. But this deadpan flatness serves a double purpose in the novel, for if Mattie is humorless, she is also completely lacking in qualities like pity and self-doubt, and her implacable stoniness—while very, very funny—is formidable, too, in a manner reminiscent of old tintypes and cartes des visites of Confederate soldier boys: dead-eye killers with rumpled hair and serious angel faces. One cannot picture Huckleberry Finn in the same light; for while Huck is an adventuresome spirit, duty and discipline are wholly foreign to him; conscripted by any army, any cause, he would desert in short order, slipping away the first chance he got to his easy riverbank life. Mattie on the other hand is the perfect soldier, despite her sex. She is as tireless as a gun dog; and while we laugh at her single-mindedness, we also stand in awe of it. In her Old Testament morality, in her legalistic and exacting turn of mind, in the thunderous blackness of her wrath “What a waste! . . . I would not rest easy until that Louisiana cur was roasting and screaming in hell!” she is less Huck Finn’s little sister than Captain Ahab’s.

True Grit is an adventure story, and though the two books in most respects could not be more different, Mattie’s quest in some ways reflects Dorothy Gale’s in The Wizard of Oz. Practical Dorothy, throughout all her trials, is really only working her way back home to Kansas; while practical Mattie, with her own mission and her own brace of unlikely travelling companions, is riding in the historical shadow of a very different Kansas: the mythical outlaw territory of Quantrill and his Confederate raiders. While Quantrill—a brilliant tactician—was