Allen Barra at the Salon on True Grit (via Maud):
The 40th anniversary reissue of Charles Portis’ “True Grit” is the third go-around for the novel since its publication and simultaneous serialization in the Saturday Evening Post. In a saner world, it wouldn’t have to be reissued, it would have always remained in print.
Why it hasn’t is one of the unsolved mysteries of modern American literature. Conventional wisdom blames the hugely successful 1969 film with John Wayne (for which he won his only Oscar). Potential readers, it has been argued, felt they’d already gotten the story from the film and didn’t need to read the book. I don’t know that I agree; I’m not at all certain that most of John Wayne’s fans read very much. “True Grit’s” going in and out of print over the last four decades probably has more to do with a reluctance to take the western seriously as literature. “True Grit” is merely one of many American books in the last half century — I’d toss Thomas Berger’s “Little Big Man,” Michael Ondaatje’s “The Collected Works of Billy the Kid” and Ron Hansen’s “Desperadoes” and “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” into this mix — that were undervalued because they seemed to bear the faint taint of genre fiction.
Via Maud again, Brock Clarke on Muriel Spark’s The prime of Miss Jean Brodie:
And I haven’t even talked about the prose yet, which is hilarious, biting, lovely, usually at the same time. How can you not love a character likeSandy whom, when an aged Miss Jean Brodie moans, “I am past my prime,” reassures her that, “It was a good prime”? How could you not love abook in which “The evening paper rattle-snaked its way through the letter boxand there was suddenly a six-o’clock feeling in the house”? How could you not love a novelist who gives her characters only a handful of ways to talk about the world, and have that be more than enough? How could anyone not love such a book? It’s enough to make you hate the people you don’t, enough to make a man forget, momentarily, his broken pinky.
Happy reading!
Tags: Charles Portis, Muriel Spark, The prime of Miss Jean Brodie, True Grit
