IT DID NOT SEEM SO STRANGE THEN:

Rereadings: How Mattie got her man (Donna Tartt, January 8, 2005, The Guardian)

It's a commonplace to say that we "love" a book, but when we say it, we really mean all sorts of things. Sometimes we mean only that we have read a book once and enjoyed it; sometimes we mean that a book was important to us in our youth, though we haven't picked it up in years; sometimes what we "love" is an impressionistic idea glimpsed from afar (Combray... mad-eleines... Tante Leonie...) as opposed to the experience of wallowing and ploughing through an actual text, and all too often people claim to love books they haven't read at all. Then there are the books we love so much that we read them every year or two, and know passages of them by heart; that cheer us when we are sick or sad and never fail to amuse us when we take them up at random; that we press on all our friends and acquaintances; and to which we return again and again with undimmed enthusiasm over the course of a lifetime. I think it goes without saying that most books that engage readers on this very high level are masterpieces; and this is why I believe that True Grit by Charles Portis is a masterpiece.

Not only have I loved True Grit since I was a child; it is a book loved passionately by my entire family. I cannot think of another novel - any novel - which is so delightful to so many disparate groups and literary tastes. Four generations of us fell for it in a swift coup de foudre - starting with my mother's grandmother, then in her early 80s, who borrowed it from the library and adored it and passed it along to my mother. My mother - her eldest granddaughter - was suspicious. There wasn't much over-lap in their reading matter: my gentle great-grandmother - born in 1890 - was the product of an extremely sheltered life, and a more innocent creature in many respects than are most six-year-olds today; whereas my mother (in her 20s then) kept books like The Boston Strangler on her bedside table. Purely from a sense of duty, she gave True Grit a try -and was so crazy about it that when she finished it, she turned back to the first page and read it all over again. My own middle-aged grandmother (whose reading habits were rather severe, running to politics and sci ence and history) was smitten by True Grit , too, which was even more remarkable since - apart from the classics of her childhood, and what she called "the great books" - she didn't even care all that much for fiction. I think she might have been the person who suggested that it be given to me to read. And I was only about 10, but I loved it too, and I've loved it ever since.

It's a great book.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 19, 2005 8:16 AM