One of the defining characteristics of American literature, as far as I'm concerned, is characters with bizarre names. What kind of a name is Huckleberry? Holden? Ahab? Atticus Finch? Boo Radley? These are not everyday run of the mill names! I don't mean this facetiously. Americans come with the kind of wack monikers you just don't encounter in the old world, the occasional Cholmondley-Featherstonehaugh notwithstanding. It's a consequence of various diasporae, of course, the Englishings and self-actualisations and fantasies of an individual or collective nature. So a book like this can have characters called Columbus Potter, Odus Wharton, Polk Goudy, and Harold and Carroll and Farrell and Darryl Permalee and a cat called General Sterling Price and it feels so goddamn real, as well as exalted to a dully-named Englishman like me. I love it.

True Grit is a breakneck masterpiece but I actually liked the other Portis I've read so far, Norwood even a bit more. I wished this one was longer! And I felt it jumped the shark or came close to doing so with its climactory snakepit scene. But Mattie's voice and the way Portis pitches it between the 14 year-old heroine and her old maid future self doing the narrating is pure literary dopamine. Huck, meet Dorothy. Y'all don't go getting into any trouble, now! Look at this sentence:

The water was not boiling but it had begun to steam a little and I picked up the can with a rag and flung it at him, then took to my feet in frantic flight.

A less brilliant writer would have gone with something like "I picked up the can of hot water and flung it at him..." or even made the water actually boiling, for violent effect. But Portis/Mattie has a curious precision to her and a way of suckerpunching the reader, so we get that downplaying intro, "the water was not boiling". Until "I picked up the can", the sentence is playing out like no more than colour, background, as the conversation between Mattie and her captor (and object of her vengeance) Tom Chaney continues to play out. Then BAM, it hits us just the way it hits Chaney! I've always thought Tom and Jerry came out of the Wild West tradition, and screwball comedy, both artforms celebrating the terrible unpredictability of the frontier, and there's a lot of both in Portis. True Grit has a hell of a lot to say about America, and it's also a good time all the time and the definition of a one-sitting novel.

It's been a long time since I got such a visceral thrill from a sentence as from the last of these three:

I have never been very fond of horses myself although I believe I was accounted a good enough rider in my youth. I never was afraid of animals. I remember once I rode a mean goat through a plum thicket on a dare.

True grit

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