August challenge; thoughtful. True Grit

She has grit. True Grit. Nancy Pearl, I mean - although young Mattie Ross has that in spades too.

Nancy Pearl is a librarian - and a librarian on a mission; to convince people to read books they might otherwise dismiss. She makes a telling distinction between ‘literature’ and ‘genre fiction’; ‘we judge genre fiction by the worst of what’s published and we judge mainstream non-genre fiction by the best’. She sees no reason why genre fiction cannot be read with the same critical awareness that we apply to ‘literature’.

It was through the writings of Nancy Pearl that I came to read True Grit.

The introduction suggests that the book was part of the literature syllabus in American schools, deemed worthy of academic study, alongside the likes of Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and Nathaniel Hawthorne - until the John Wayne film came out. This apparently changed its status. What was ‘literature’ is now genre fiction - and a Western at that. This is a shame; it’s a wonderful book - beautifully drawn characters and a compelling, yet straightforward story. And quite unlike the John Wayne film; the Coen Brothers’ later version is closer in spirit. But for me, the book is in a different league altogether.

The literarti, needing a justification for reading such a book, might say that it ‘transcends the Western genre’. This handy phrase, which can be applied to any book, simply means ‘it’s better than I expected.’ Or better, perhaps, than it ought to be is what they really mean.

True Grit is written from the point of view of an older woman (Mattie Ross) looking back at her 14-year old self; of the time when she set out to bring to justice the man who murdered her father. The plot is simple, but the ideas presented are not; morality, revenge and justice.

As events unfold, Mattie comes to dominate the narrative - this is her story. And her voice is so distinctive;
"People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day".

Mattie is funny, intelligent and passionate about what she feels she has to do.

So too is Nancy Pearl. Her approach to reading is set out in what she calls the Rule of 50 which states;
"If you still don't like a book after slogging through the first 50 pages, set it aside. If you're more than 50 years old, subtract your age from 100 and only grant it that many pages.”

If you don’t usually read books that tend to be found on the Western shelves, True Grit might well hold a pleasant surprise. So too might All the pretty horses (Cormac McCarthy), The cowboy and the cossack (Clair Huffaker), Valdez is coming (James Ellroy) and The Searchers (Alan Le May) - the latter again quite different from the film of that name.

For other suggestions see NancyPearl.com