Many reporters think they have a novel or two in them and some do. The novels are seldom good ones though and are often stories about daring young reporters who stumble upon dark doings by powerful people, nefarious types who need to be exposed by ... a daring young reporter. The prose is efficient and tight until they overreach and try for “literature.” That’s when it’s hooted off the stage.
Sometimes, though, a reporter’s voice is just right for the story, and Charles Portis’s 1968 novelTrue Grit is one of those times. Portis has a degree in journalism and worked in the field from 1958 to 1964.
If you’ve seen either production of the movie, the 1969 version or the 2010 Joel and Ethan Coen one, the narrator’s voice will be familiar. It belongs to the aging version of 14-year-old Mattie Ross, a hyper-logical, highly intelligent, deeply religious Arkansan who hires a grizzled ranger named “Rooster” Cogburn to avenge her father’s unjust death by “the scoundrel” Tom Chaney.
Her tone, as rendered by Portis, is consistent throughout. Even when she cries or is in fear for her life, her emotions are rendered in a dispassionate, nearly reportorial way. If this sounds disparaging it’s by mistake. True Grit is a terrific, fast read that gives us an authentic American voice of that era.
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A greater problem I had with the version I got of the novel was Donna Tartt’s afterword. I read Tartt’s 2013 The Goldfinch and wondered what all the fuss was about. I found nothing exceptional or memorable about the book, and it failed to make me care about even its most sympathetic characters. But it was a Big Book that mostly took place in New York and critics like that. I’m told that Tartt’s earlier novels were better, but I can’t imagine reading them now as I’m sure I’d second guess everything about them as I did.
Her ten page afterword does nothing to enhance True Grit. It’s clear when you read it that it was meant to be a preface, not an afterword, and that she wrote it as one. (Who would end an afterword with “I am delighted to have the honor of introducing Mattie Ross and Rooster Cogburn to a new generation of readers”?) Tartt gets the novel’s time period wrong, odd considering that she claims to have read it numerous times and that it was “loved passionately” by her entire family while she was growing up. Tartt seems to think the book takes place earlier than it did, “shortly after the Civil War,” and that Cogburn was in his “late forties.” But there’s a direct reference to the sitting American president and that president was Rutherford B. Hayes, who didn’t take office until 1877. That would have made Cogburn, who’s year of birth is given as 1835, as young as 42 and no older than 46 (Hayes served for one term). And would anyone call 1957 “shortly after World War II”? Doubtful.
If you get this version of True Grit, skip the afterword. The book stands on its own.