#24 True Grit

This is the first of my many books to be read in Yellowstone National Park.  So I decided to start off with an entirely enjoyable western that was funny and also a great story.

True Grit, Charles Portis, 224 pages.

I don't know where to begin.  While reading the Coen Brothers adaptation so dominated my mind while reading it was near impossible to imagine LeBouef as anyone other than Matt Damon, who embodied that role.  Rooster was a little easier to read as Bridges and Wayne both handled that character with varying degrees of success.  Mattie Ross looked just like the little girl from the recent movie.  I pictured the movie and not the images that Charles Portis took care to describe.  I read each scene anticipating each move and dialogue, and was not disappointed.  This is by no means a bad thing, it was like singing along to your favorite song.  You enjoy it, and so did I.

One thing though that was added to the movie was the Jeremiah Johnson frontiersman who was lugging around a toothless corpse.  Portis did not have this short scene.

The one thing that was more visible in the novel was that Mattie was more inclined to her religion and money, saying so much at the close of the novel.  I think this is a nice little bit of information about her and shows that her accusers were wrong about her.  She does love things other than religion and her bank, she loved her father.  It played out like a business transaction, but the motive was not business.  She hired Rooster, a drunk, but followed him years later to Memphis, not for business, but for love.  I guess I'm trying to say she was a slightly more developed character in the novel.  She may not have intended being developed in her narrative, it came out despite herself.