True Grit Charles Portis' novels get a second shot with American readers By Sophie Annan FOUR of Charles Portis' novels are being reissued. When casual readers know the name Portis at all, which is rare, it's usually as the author of True Grit . And then I heard her laughing upstairs. Portis writes road stories that spend most of their time lost on the dusty detours, celebrating the unexpected and the absurd.
Characters tell their life stories in non sequiturs.
Come to think of it, their life stories are non sequiturs. Then came True Grit . I was much too cool back then to touch anything associated with John Wayne, so I passed on this novel for years, and then found out I'd been missing a true comedy, a road story with a gutsy girl as protagonist. When Gringos came out, I was living in Mexico. The novel is set in Yucatan, but his characters and their loopy concerns are the very same as those I ran into on the Pacific Coast and in the west central highlands.