True Grit Is Truly Amazing

I first read True Grit back in 2009 when I initially learned that the Coen Brothers had turned the novel into a script.  Last week I finally had the pleasure to reread it, and better yet, to read it aloud to my wife.  She sometimes suffers from insomnia, and being read to forces her mind to stop yelling at her and let her drift off to sleep instead.  And I’ll tell you, Charles Portis writes with such music in his phrases that the rhythm of each sentence is a pure joy to read out loud.  And yes, I read the entire novel with a bad southern accent.

True Grit is a true masterpiece; everything it does, it does to perfection.  The characters are engaging and full of life.  The humor is spot on.  The relationships grow and change in subtle and powerful ways.  The writing is gorgeous and insightful.  The tone and Mattie’s voice are consistent and gripping.  Mattie Ross, our fearless narrator, is one of the finest literary creations ever.  From her opening paragraph, to her financial wrangling with Col. Stonehill over his debt to her and her family, to her handling of Rooster Cogburn and her unflinching dealings with LaBoeuf, to her facing down of Tom Chaney who had murdered her father—in all these things, Mattie is breathtaking in the sheer amount of ass-kicking she does.

Because I love the novel so dearly, I am hesitant to look into the political and ethical stances that lay at the foundation of the story.  This story is American to its very core, depicting a frontier life of self-reliance, revenge, and unexplored morality plucked from the bible.  Rooster Cogburn is a lawman who certainly has his own moral code, but who is only too happy to be judge and executioner as well.  When Mattie consults with the Fort Smith sheriff to find herself a Marshal to hunt Chaney down, she asks for the “best,” to which the sheriff replies, 

I would have to weigh that proposition . . . .  The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn.  He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don’t enter into his thinking. . . . Now L.T. Quinn, he brings his prisoners in alive.  He may let one get by now and then but he believes even the worst of men is entitled to a fair shake. . . . He will not plant evidence or abuse a prisoner.  He is straight as a string.  Yes, I will say Quinn is about the best they have.

Mattie of course responds, “Where can I find this Rooster.”  For all of Mattie’s moralizing asides, she does not want morality to enter into this quest for revenge.  In case we doubted the sheriff’s characterization, we get the courtroom transcript of Cogburn’s testimony in the trial of Odus Wharton, in which it is clear that Rooster is not “straight as a string.”

There is great humor in Mattie’s choice and in Cogburn’s courtroom testimony, and Portis makes it clear who these characters are and what they want.  That Rooster rode with William Quantrill in the Civil War and defended Quantrill against LaBoeuf only reinforces who we know Rooster to be.  And don’t even get me tangling with Mattie’s outspoken devotion to the almighty dollar and capitalism.  So the question is this: is Portis making a larger statement about morality and America?  I don’t know.  It seems to be that it’s doing something there, but what exactly that is isn’t clear to me.  The story is first a foremost about this stunning protagonist and her unlikely friendship with these two brutal men.  The story softens them all, and Mattie’s restrained narrative voice only makes that softening that much more powerful.

I am planning on reading Portis’s other 4 novels as well as the published collection of his short stories and other writings, so I expect who Portis is and what is important to him will become clearer to me in time.

Whatever his politics and intentions, he is one hell of a writer, and so far, that’s good enough for me.

Up with Updraft

I have been involved in a personal reading challenge for the last 7 years, during which time, my son has aged from being a 10-year-old to a 17-year-old.  He is an avid reader (and a fast reader!) and always enjoys talking about the books he reads.  Except for pausing my reading challenge to read the three Hunger Games books, I have not been able to participate much in what he has been reading, though he has many times asked me to.  This Christmas, just before I finished my long reading list, a friend got my son Fran Wilde’s Updraft.  My son finished in quickly as usual, and being a fan of dystopian novels, he insisted that I read it too so we could talk about it.

Updraft follows many of the tropes of the YA dystopian novel.  The protagonist is a headstrong young woman, Kirit, who doesn’t much question the world she lives in at the opening of the novel.  She knows precisely who she wants to be in this life and is focused on her own immediate future.  The city has rules and laws in place in the name of protecting the city, and the enforcers of those laws are mysterious and threatening.  Kirit accidentally runs afoul of those laws and her entire future (or at least the one she so clearly envisioned) is threatened.  Like her other YA protagonists, Kirit has a few special gifts, and her unsettled place in the world makes her uniquely qualified to change its course.

Wilde handles her tropes expertly and the world she creates is unique, fascinating, and mysterious.  It’s a world in which humans live above the clouds in towers of living bone that are rumored to possible be part of one structure somewhere out of sight below the clouds.  The main external threat to the city are “skymouths,” flying, people-eating, squid-like creatures whose skin renders them invisible, so that the first time you see them is when their gaping maws come to claim you.  The adults of the city move about on human-made wings, and the towers are occasionally joined together by bridges made from the sinews of killed skymouths.  It’s a fascinating world and wonderfully realized throughout the novel.

The politics of the world are of course the heart of the novel, and they are every bit as intriguing as the physical one.  Updraft, like most YA dystopian novels, is about methods of control and the sacrifice people make in the name of safety.  Particularly, Updraft is about secrets and the withholding of information as a means of shaping and maintaining social structures.  But like all weapons, once peace and order is attained, those with access to the information are tempted to misuse it to secure their positions.  Wilde creates well-formed antagonists for Kirit to struggle against.

The novel is touching and fun to read and there are pockets of lovely prose that soar above the utilitarian, which is the default of YA fiction.  I enjoyed reading it, and have greatly enjoyed being able to talk to my son about it.  I will definitely be reading books 2 and 3 to see how the story develops and to learn more about the secrets of the city of bone.