At the sparkling and newly designed site of the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), Julie Cline appreciates the novels of Charles Portis while putting them in context:

It’s been suggested that Portis is or ought to be ashamed to have written True Grit, and maybe he is, but he didn’t write it, actually, not quite. He channeled an unmarried septuagenarian named Mattie Ross who reaches into her memory and conjures a vision of herself at fourteen, of the winter of 1873 when The Coward Tom Chaney murdered her father and stole his ponies and she tumbled into a snake pit and lost an arm, and she writes this “true account,” which, in pioneer days and after, was well-trod terrain, a known genre.

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