The Ballad of Mattie Ross

TRUE GRIT by Charles Portis. 215 pages. Simon & Schuster. $4.95.

Publishers, cowering behind their accountants' ledgers, aim primarily to pick off winners, not pick up literature. But every once in a while, through the magic of ricochet and carom, they manage to do both with a single resounding shot. Such is the fate of this book. True Grit is a lean but plucky novel that has been sold to the movies for $300,000, serialized in the Saturday Evening Post and chosen as a Literary Guild selection. It is also gilded with literary quality that can delight book lovers as well as bookkeepers.

Charles Portis, 34, is an Arkansas newspaperman who has fashioned a pop anti-western in the best tradition of Cat Ballou and the Ballad of Dingus Magee. For openers, his hero is a heroine: Mattie Ross, a sassy, 14-year-old Arkansan whose chief protective girdle is a dry Bible-belt faith, and who is out to avenge the murder of her daddy back in the 1870s.

Mattie enlists the aid of Rooster Cogburn, a U.S. marshal who once rode with Quantrill's border gang during the Civil War, but has since become fat and 40, one-eyed and sloppy. Soon they are joined by LaBoeuf, a straight-shooting (but not always accurate) Texas Ranger, who wants to get the same outlaw for an earlier rap and a larger reward.

The burden of the tale is the usual pursuit and chase. What gives the slender story distinction is its unusual style and attitude. It is all rendered from the self-righteously smug "That's the way it was" point of view of the heroine half a century later. Thus the violence is imbued with a bigger-than-camp Bonnie and Clyde quality: the stock two-dimensional figures of the familiar western landscape become disfigured here with a three-dimensional reality as limbs are chopped off and buckshot imbeds itself painfully beneath facial skin.

Author Portis always streaks his Grand Guignol gore with the humor that is implicit in Mattie's character and situation, although sometimes he is guilty of playing it a bit too quaintsy. Mattie's prowess as a horse trader, for example, is overdrawn to the point where character rides off into caricature toward a last stand at the credibility gap. And he finds it necessary to pad his dangerously thin tale with an overlong excursion into Rooster's gun-cocking past.

But Portis has succeeded in creating in Mattie Ross a triumphant character, with true grit and sand, an original piece of Americana--sort of a Portrait of Whistler's Mother as a Young Girl in Indian Territory. And he has most vividly produced a true mock western: one in which blood flows with the same impact as real tomato soup suddenly gushing out of an Andy Warhol tin.

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