True Grit

True Grit
by Charles Portis
read: 2011

I saw the movie, the Coen Brothers one, before I read True Grit.  I found both entertaining but not earthshattering.  The characters, especially Mattie Ross and Rooster Cogburn, are great and iconic, and the action moves at a quick pace, but it's not the sort of deep book I would mull on for weeks.

The narrative is fundamentally a revenge story, and contains many of the cliches of a good guy / bad guy Western.  What's interesting is that the narrator is not Mattie in the moment as the 14-year-old adventurer, but an older Mattie looking back on her experiences.  One gets the impression that Mattie would not change anything about what happened, but it's hard not to look at her quiet, lonely adult life and wonder if she bears emotional scars from her experiences along with the physical ones.  At the very least, the fact that so many years later this is the only episode of her life she feels worth retelling carries an element of tragedy.