The Novelist Who Truly Understood the South
A punch-drunk love of American language swells throughout the Coen brothers’ films: the rapid-fire New York dialogue in The Hudsucker Proxy, the nasal timbre of the upper Plains in Fargo, the California dude-speak in The Big Lebowski. In 2010, that passion drew them to reprise True Grit, based on the novelist Charles Portis’s tour de force about a teenage girl’s quest to avenge her father’s death. Set in 1870s Arkansas and the Choctaw lands of present-day Oklahoma, the book brims with colloquialisms and cadences that are best read aloud.
Many Americans don’t realize that was originally a novel, published in 1968. Though often framed as a Western (probably because of John Wayne’s swaggering performance in the first screen adaption), it fits within Portis’s broader oeuvre—one that is inexorably southern in its evocation of a particular place and people, and in its bundles his five novels with select stories, essays, and journalism, elevating him to the level of some of his better-known peers: Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy. The retrospective reveals a consummate humorist and sharp-eyed chronicler of human flaws—those deeply embedded racial, religious, and socioeconomic prejudices Portis observed in the American South, a region that he saw as a microcosm for the country as a whole.
