He’s right, but one of the abiding truths of the novel is that it is Mattie, and not Cogburn - or LaBoeuf, the Texas Ranger who joins them - who is the real adult here, the only one with a sense of what’s at stake. It is the 1870s, and the pursuit takes them into Indian Territory, which, Cogburn keeps insisting, is no place for a teenage girl. marshal named Rooster Cogburn to go after the man who shot and killed her father in nearby Fort Smith. The story is pretty basic: 14-year-old Mattie Ross, of Yell County, Ark., hires a U.S. And like Twain also, he respects his young narrator as a human being with a fully developed moral sensibility, even when the adults in the novel don’t. Like Twain, Portis is a master of voice, of deadpan narration played for comic effect. Laconic, Western, trafficking in the substrata of American mythos, it also has a lot in common with “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” as Donna Tartt points out in her afterword to a new edition of the novel released to promote the Coen brothers’ movie remake, which opens Wednesday. “True Grit,” rather, operates in the tradition of Thomas Berger’s “Little Big Man” and David Shetzline’s “DeFord,” both of which were published, perhaps not coincidentally, within a few years of Portis’ book.

Both take place in the Old West, and both involve adolescent protagonists, but there the resemblance ends. Back then, I had no idea what Portis was doing I read the book as if it were in the vein of, say, Sid Fleischman’s “By the Great Horn Spoon!,” a novel for young readers about the Gold Rush. That was the case for me with Charles Portis’ 1968 novel “True Grit” (Tusk/Overlook: 236 pp., $14.95 paper), which I first picked up in the early 1970s, after seeing the film with John Wayne. Sometimes you read a book at the wrong time.

The novel true grit