In the days after the election, as the list of cabinet appointments seemed to confirm the likelihood that Trump would make good on the worst of his promises and threats; as House races ticked closer and closer to giving Republicans trifecta control of Congress; as the future looked bleaker and bleaker on both the domestic and international landscape, I allowed myself to spend some useless grief in dwelling on the past, particularly this childish but sincere feeling of injury to the principle of fairness: he got away with everything. He delayed, denied, and appealed, and it worked. Sure, he had some help from his friends in the judiciary, but in the end, it’s hard not to credit him with defying the odds through sheer force of will. Our justice system, which gets so much wrong for so many people, couldn’t even get this right.
In 2016, too, the general election had promised a reckoning that never arrived—how dearly I had hoped to see him eat shit on election night!—though in that instance his offenses weren’t against the law, just the badly-frayed social fabric of the country.
In the weeks after that first election, I had spent a lot of time lying on the couch, grieving in a constant, airless way that now seems painfully innocent, and reading over and over Charles Portis’s 1968 novel True Grit. For reasons I couldn’t fully grasp at the time, I found a strange solace in that book, which all these years later I understand to be about the fickle and fugitive hope, when living in a difficult historical period, that punishment might once again, somehow, fit the crime.
*
In True Grit, a fourteen-year-old girl named Mattie attempts to avenge her father’s murder: a man named Tom Chaney has shot her father and fled into the lawless territory that isn’t yet Oklahoma. In search of Chaney, Mattie travels the wilderness with two men she’s hired with the last of her small inheritance, a Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf and a one-eyed U.S. Marshal named Rooster Cogburn. They get him in the end.
The novel’s plot, then, is one of vigilante justice, where Mattie and her comrades must fill the void that emerges between a feckless legal apparatus and the unfinished colonial project of manifest destiny. But the story is something else: the subtlest, funniest, and most moving aspect of the novel is a drama that takes place at the level of the narration. The text we’re reading was ostensibly written by an elderly Mattie, who recalls the events of her girlhood in a stiff, understated first-person. Portis gives her an untutored, flat style, with no contractions and scarcely a comma to be seen: “At the city police station we found two officers but they were having a fist fight and were not available for inquiries.”
True Grit is a story about how, in times of upheaval, the mind clings to systems for safety.This is intended to be funny, obviously; but just as often, Mattie is mortally serious. She takes every possible opportunity to superimpose a moral lesson on her story, because it is her fervent ambition to transform a tale of lawlessness and gruesome violence into a starchy allegory about the Presbyterian doctrine of Election, or predestination. According to this doctrine, human destiny is written in advance by an author-God, leaving no room for free will, but humans themselves can never know whether they’re among the chosen or the preterite. In support of this view, Mattie regularly turns away from the plot in order to deliver gnomic utterances about fate and grace—so often that, for me, they take on a kind of gothic humor of their own, much like the salvational exhortations, written in a tiny and perfect hand, that fill the paintings of Howard Finster. For example, confronted with a line of prisoners shackled together “like fish on a string,” Mattie tells us,
They had ridden the ‘hoot-owl trail’ and tasted the fruits of evil and now justice had caught up with them to demand payment. You must pay for everything in this world one way and another. There is nothing free except the Grace of God. You cannot earn that or deserve it.
“I confess it is a hard doctrine,” she admits, “running contrary to our earthly ideas of fair play, but I can see no way around it.”
Well, maybe. As the story advances, Portis makes it clear that Mattie has willingly, even willfully, recast her life’s story as a parable. The quest at the heart of True Grit isn’t just about revenge; it’s also a quest for meaning.
All this is to say that, even if Mattie might wish to illustrate how God has prewritten her fate and ours, this isn’t necessarily what Portis wishes to illustrate. In a 2003 essay for The Believer, Ed Park observed that True Grit “could hardly seem more out of step with the countercultural spirit of ’68,” the year it was published. And yes, True Grit is generically a Western: an adventure story, basically, and a funny one at that. But beneath the novel’s stylistic and comedic virtuosity, I have increasingly come to feel that Portis is telling a different story, in which 1870 is made to speak for ’68. Not by way of allegory, but indirectly—something like what Samuel R. Delany has called “a resonance between an idea and a landscape.”
*
Portis, it must be said, was well attuned to the political terrain of his time, in all its anarchic possibility, its violent reaffirmations of the status quo, and its persistent reminders that man’s law and God’s law don’t always align. Before he began writing novels, he was a working journalist; the engagement of his reporting is apparent from even a cursory glance through Escape Velocity, a collection of his extranovelistic writing published in 2012.
In 1957, Portis was present at the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. In 1962, he traveled to Washington, D.C. on a women’s “peace train,” twenty traincars filled with “tweedy, well-shod matrons” who arrived “in a driving rainstorm to picket and demonstrate for peace in front of the White House.” He covered Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 civil rights protest in Birmingham, at which he interviewed both King and the infamous Eugene “Bull” Connor, who gloated to Portis that one of King’s more prominent aides had been carried away from the protest in an ambulance. “Too bad it wasn’t a hearse,” Connor told Portis. Later that week, Portis reported from a crowd in which, as his circumspect account put it, “Some of the newsmen were hit with rocks and beer cans.” He gave the New York Herald Tribune a comic dispatch from a Birmingham KKK meeting, which, per Portis, “for all its cross-burning and hooded panoply, is a much duller affair than one might expect. […] By 10:30 p.m. one of the crosses had collapsed, and the other was just smoldering,” and at the night’s end, “the grand dragon of Mississippi disappeared grandly into the Southern night, his car engine hitting on about three cylinders.”
The next month, in Tuscaloosa, Portis described the “strange ballet” of state and federal troops as President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard in order to stop Governor George Wallace from resisting the integration of the University of Alabama. The day after the assassination of Medgar Evers, Portis was on the ground in Jackson, Mississippi. Portis interviewed Malcolm X, addressing him throughout as “Mr. X.” (“To call him ‘Malcolm,’” Portis later said, “would have been a little familiar.”)
In 1964, the Tribune sent Portis to London, where he was made bureau chief (“Karl Marx’s old gig,” Ed Park points out), but a year into the job, he quit. He moved back to Arkansas, where he began living in a fishing shack and writing fiction.
On its face, this decision to write fiction rather than journalism might seem like a turn away from reality—a reality in which, by the time he started writing True Grit, Kennedy and X and King had all been murdered. But in Portis’s writing, and in True Grit especially, I see an Oklahoma of the mind in which these convulsions are powerfully resonant. True Grit is a story about how, in times of upheaval, the mind clings to systems for safety. And in staging this psychological fact, Portis’s novel echoes a contemporary novel not typically mentioned in the same breath: The Crying of Lot 49, which was published three years earlier. What’s implicit in Portis is explicit in Pynchon: both novels, I think, are attempts to represent a mind metabolizing the upheavals and anxieties of the era.
In The Crying of Lot 49, a woman named Oedipa Maas either does or doesn’t stumble onto a secret postal service, active since the Jacobean period, that facilitates a vast network of sub rosa communication in defiance of the established order—either that, or she’s seeing things. Oedipa reels through the streets of San Narcisco, California, seeing clues, patterns, connections. The service’s mailboxes, which closely resemble trash cans, are labeled with the acronym w.a.s.t.e., but sometimes she has to look very closely to make out the periods between the letters. Is she onto something? Or is it all an elaborate prank by a wealthy ex-lover? Or has she been slipped LSD by her Nazi psychiatrist, Dr. Hilarius? The manifold possibilities leave her stunned:
They’ll call it paranoia. They. Either you have stumbled indeed […] onto a secret richness and concealed density of dream; onto a network by which X number of Americans are truly communicating whilst reserving their lies, recitations of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty, for the official government delivery system; maybe even onto a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody American you know, and you too, sweetie. Or you are hallucinating it.
“Behind the hieroglyphic streets,” Pynchon continues, “there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth. […] Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none.” And there is no end to this oscillation between a redeemed world and a formless void. The novel closes with Oedipa (and, by extension, the reader) awaiting a never-delivered final revelation with “the courage you find you have when there is nothing left to lose.”
By this point, Pynchon has imbued the drama with a certain timelessness, giving Oedipa’s quest a metaphysical dimension akin to The Castle or The Trial, but it’s also clear that Pynchon means to address a set of circumstances specific to America in the sixties. The atrocities of the Vietnam War. The brutal racism that culminated in the Watts uprising. The bomb. The way industrial capitalism had made dead-eyed cynics of everybody, desperate for yet terminally skeptical of hope. The long-vanished frontier. No wonder insurrection was in the air, no wonder college campuses now seemed places “where the most beloved of folklores may be brought into doubt, cataclysmic of dissents voiced, suicidal of commitments chosen—the sort that bring governments down.” “1957,” Oedipa muses to herself, thinking of her own college days: “Another world.”
Similarly, the quest at the heart of True Grit isn’t just about revenge; it’s also a quest for meaning in a world grown increasingly slippery and strange. As Mattie travels further and further into the Choctaw Nation in search of Tom Chaney, her father’s killer, the reality of True Grit begins to warp. Psychological and moral ambiguity come with the territory: beyond the borders of the United States lies a lawless land of rumor, deception, and plain old oddity. Out here, names drift. Tom Chaney’s name, we learn, might actually be Chelmsford. The villainous Permalee brothers are named Darryl, Carroll, Farrell, and Harold, which has a rather Pynchonian mouthfeel. In this context, Mattie’s theological gloss seems more and more like a desperate insistence—not an attempt to describe order but to create it.
In one remarkable sequence, three thieves about to be hanged deliver three meditations upon the theme of human agency in salvation. “I killed my best friend in a trifling quarrel over a pocketknife,” one man announces. “I was drunk and it could just as easily have been my brother. If I had received good instruction as a child I would be with my family today and at peace with my neighbors.” It sounds like something out of a gospel parable, which is to say, it sounds a lot like Mattie.
Elsewhere, the plot begins to verge on providential in ways that strain credulity: one day out in the wilderness, Mattie stumbles out of her bedroll, rolls down a hill, and finds herself facing Tom Chaney, her father’s killer, who bears a black mark on his face. It’s gunpowder under the skin, Mattie explains, but also, conveniently, a double of the mark of “banished Cain.” We’re left to wonder whether there’s a mark on his face at all, whether this symbol belongs to the bare facts of Mattie’s reality, or to her subsequent gloss on that reality.
But if this symbolic superstructure is in fact Mattie’s invention, it’s not hard to imagine why. The bare facts of her life would break your heart. When the novel opens, Mattie has traveled from her home in Dardanelle to Fort Smith, where she arranges to send her father’s body back to be buried. But Mattie doesn’t go home, even though she knows she’ll miss his funeral, because she is determined to track down her father’s killer. Totally alone, she arranges lodging at a boarding house, where the owner makes her share a bed with an old woman who steals the blankets all night, leaving Mattie “bunched up in a knot and trembling with cold from the exposure.” Mattie endures this for hours until finally she gets up and wraps herself in her dead father’s coat. “Then,” she writes, “I slept all right.”
Mattie gives us nothing of her interiority, no emotional content at all, none of the terrible grief and rage she must have felt. It’s the same when Mattie sees a man’s fingers chopped off right in front of her, when she sees men killed, and when she finally shoots Chaney, her father’s killer, of which she says only this: “I hurriedly cocked the hammer and pulled the trigger. The charge exploded and sent a lead ball of justice, too long delayed, into the criminal head of Tom Chaney.”
Mattie travels through her past with such a steely countenance that I often found myself stopping and doubling back, imagining what she doesn’t describe, creating an unwritten text alongside Mattie’s. I found myself moved and troubled by the adult narrator’s attempt to write her younger self into stoicism. We’re invited, I think, to fill the novel’s unnarrated spaces with this psychology, and to understand that Portis has given Mattie this moralizing, allegorizing impulse for reasons that have to do with character: writing this story is her way of making it tolerable.
The quest at the heart of True Grit isn’t just about revenge; it’s also a quest for meaning in a world grown increasingly slippery and strange.Nevertheless, the story refuses to hold still. The more we read, and the closer we look, the more the heroes and villains resemble one another. The outlaw “Lucky” Ned Pepper surprises Mattie with his gentleness, whereas Rooster Cogburn, our gunslinging hero, doesn’t look great on paper: during the Civil War, we learn, Rooster rode with the Confederate guerillas William Quantrill and “Bloody Bill” Anderson, real historical figures whose career of sadistic killing culminated in the 1864 Centralia massacre, where they murdered 24 unarmed Union soldiers.
Many of Rooster’s casual allusions are Confederate as well: he calls a boatman “Admiral Semmes,” after a Confederate commerce raider, and his cat is named for General Sterling Price, a Confederate general who fled to Mexico rather than surrender. If Rooster Cogburn does end up a hero, it is because he behaves heroically within the context of the story, but whether he’s finally “good” or “bad” is left an open question—perhaps, as Mattie’s doctrine of Election would have it, it’s not for us to know.
Both the physical and moral landscape of True Grit are unmapped and perhaps unmappable. When Mattie finally shoots Chaney/Chelmsford, the kick knocks her backward into a pit, where she finds herself stuck, with one arm broken, and face to face with a skeleton with a ball of rattlesnakes curled in its chest, a fortuitous and/or heavy-handed figure for the poisonous hatred that has led her to seek revenge, and which will cost her an arm. Here, it’s impossible to tease apart Mattie’s narration from the events of her “real” life. The symbolic elements of the story run together with reality: can this possibly have happened and, finally, does it matter?
A more useful question, I think, is whether we should begrudge Mattie this willful reading: whether any of us would do differently, and whether there isn’t something heroic about her effort to fashion a truth that can’t entirely be located in reality.
*
Portis’s frontier is a lawless land of rumor and outright deception. His villains lie, naturally, but so do his heroes: out here, it’s impossible to verify anything. It’s your word against mind. That flash on the horizon? That’s the truth. It’s the same deep indeterminacy present in Moby-Dick, where Ishmael makes the wry observation that whalers see land so seldom that, were a new Noah’s flood to transpire, they’d miss it. At sea for years without means of writing home, whalers were more isolated than astronauts. Our confidence in simultaneous knowing has overwritten such uncertainty: it vanished bit by bit with the mail system, the railroads, the synchronization of clocks between cities, the telegraph, the phone, the internet.
But in Portis’s landscape, I recognize America in the long shadow of the 2016 election, this country that has come to seem so unrecognizable. If novels emerge from distinct historical moments, perhaps they also return to us with particular intensity when the time is right, or wrong; and this is a time when “the ancient forces of greed and fear,” as Pynchon puts it in Inherent Vice, seem to stalk the land with renewed vigor. Trump’s M.O. since those early days has been, essentially, to lie so copiously and remorselessly that journalists have to waste time doubling down on things that are by any standard obvious, creating a media ecosystem that is a baffling and intransigent thicket of truths, all of which Trump can wave away as “fake news” or, as his spokesperson Steven Cheung is now fond of putting it, “Trump derangement syndrome.” Reading the news, it’s hard not to feel exhausted, condescended to, and finally—because I know that Trump labors under no illusions about the world he is lying into existence—mocked.
Surely, I would tell myself back in 2016, these outright lies must be taking their toll: about the Bowling Green Massacre, about Trump’s inauguration being the largest in history. And that Orwellian coinage “alternative facts”—surely the people who voted for Trump would see through these clownish lies to the truth. But if the subsequent eight years have indicated anything, it’s that we’re far from any kind of consensus truth, and getting further every day. At the beginning, people liked to talk about a “post-truth” era, but at some point we entered instead an era of many truths, multiple truths, which ultimately amount to the same thing.
During the 2024 election cycle, when Trump repeated his racist lie about pet-eating Haitian immigrants with even less shame than usual, when J.D. Vance whined about being fact-checked by moderators at the Vice Presidential debate, it was possible to dream of November’s vote as a referendum that could return us to some basic agreement on what was and wasn’t true. But in the aftermath of Trump’s modest victory—his remarkable third consecutive win at the ballot box, as the historical record may soon have it—the truth is already reacquainting us with its old relativity; if it ever escaped the wilderness of ignorance and outright mendacity, it has returned to that thicket.
*
The full narrative situation of True Grit doesn’t become clear until the book’s end, when Mattie leaps forward to the present day, to the time of writing. With her characteristic flatness, and without self-pity, she enumerates her present circumstances, and tells us about her reasons for composing this account. Rooster has died, and she doesn’t know where LaBoeuf ended up. Her family is gone, except for her aging mother. Although (or because) Mattie has amassed a small fortune from moneylending, she isn’t well liked. She knows that people call her “a cranky old maid,” but she doesn’t let it bother her.
“People love to talk,” she writes. “They love to slander you if you have any substance. They say I love nothing but money and the Presbyterian Church and that is why I never married. They think everybody is dying to get married,” she tells us, and notes that “A woman with brains and a frank tongue and one sleeve pinned up and an invalid mother to care for is at some disadvantage.”
As ever, the emotional content of these lines is mostly suppressed, but the hint of anger here says far more than this stubborn narrator ever will: she’s lonely. And at the novel’s closing lines, the story snaps into a new focus:
I heard nothing more of the Texas officer, LaBoeuf. If he is yet alive and should happen to read these pages, I will be pleased to hear from him. I judge he is in his seventies now, and nearer eighty than seventy. I expect some of the starch has gone out of that ‘cowlick.’ Time just gets away from us. This ends my true account of how I avenged Frank Ross’s blood over in the Choctaw Nation when snow was on the ground.
The first time I read True Grit, I had to double back: If he is yet alive and should happen to read these pages, I will be pleased to hear from him.
In other words, Mattie hopes LaBoeuf will read her text and reach out. It’s a call for companionship, and a gesture that contradicts much of what Mattie has told us about fate. Because if it’s all written in advance, by a God-author, why bother reaching out to LaBoeuf? If it doesn’t matter, if we can’t change things, why try? Despite her tough veneer, there’s nothing fatalistic about this ending. It’s hopeful. It’s suddenly unguarded. I find it very moving.
In this light, Mattie’s moral lessons seem to be directed inward as much as out. If it was all prewritten, preordained, it couldn’t have gone differently. It was meant to be this way, she tells herself, and it can’t be helped and never could have been—but if he should happen to read these pages, I will be pleased to hear from him.
The quietly anarchic possibility of this gesture, in the context of the whole, made me feel certain that Portis’s subject matter wasn’t predestination itself, but rather the tendency of the human mind to seek refuge in rigid systems, in doctrines, but to do so imperfectly, incompletely, for the mind contains doubts and contradictions that doctrines simply do not. Mattie’s hopefulness is, for me, a final act of courage—grit, even—and although we can never know that LaBoeuf did, in fact, read those pages, we can hope.
*
What’s at stake in the search for truth is, inevitably, the viability of a system of values: the hope that life itself, and not just the books we read, might bear out our all-too-human concepts of justice. And this is why True Grit has finally upset, perhaps for the last time, my definition of what constitutes a “realistic” novel: because how else can a novel, which necessarily operates by authorial omniscience, represent a lived reality that’s simultaneously meaningless and brimming with terrible immanent meaning? I’m not sure it can, unless that novel flirts with chaos, even inflicts that chaos on the reader.
Most of us live brief lives and make no mark on history. We don’t get to choose our circumstances, and neither do we get to decide what our hearts and minds do when the world seems to convulse and invert. Unlike Portis’s journalism, True Grit doesn’t pass judgment on the political situation at all; he simply makes us feel it in our blood. If anything in his novel is sacred, it might be Mattie’s hope, which is to say, her doubt. One’s capacity for heartbreak is a sure sign that one still has a heart.
