True Grit

Mattie Ross is fourteen when a hired hand shoots her father dead in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and takes his horse and his money. She settles his affairs, out-negotiates a horse trader, hires the most disreputable available U.S. marshal, and rides into Indian Territory after the killer. The whole thing is narrated by Mattie herself as an old woman, decades later, in a flat, legalistic, scripture-quoting voice that never once asks for sympathy — which is why the book is funny and why it holds up.

It is the least conventional of the three Westerns in this band. Portis takes the revenge plot straight but tells it in a register that keeps undercutting the genre’s self-importance, and the result has a cult standing among writers out of proportion to his five slim novels. Two well-known film adaptations, in 1969 and 2010, have somewhat obscured how good the sentences are.

Context: Listed under Western in the Ages 13-99+ band, Lexile 800 — the lowest in the shard, which reflects Mattie’s plain declarative sentences rather than the book’s difficulty.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the curriculum this came from; the adult “Ages 13-99+” band is the part Kyle carded.
• Charles Portis — the author.
• The Virginian — the conventions this novel is working against, carded from the same list.
• The Lonesome Gods — the third Western in the adult band.
• Frontier — Indian Territory in the 1870s, and the reach of federal law into it.
• Justice — Mattie’s own word for what she is after, and the book is careful never to settle whether she got it.
• Storytelling — a first-person voice doing nearly all the work.
• Republic of Letters — the portfolio idea.