If Portis ultimately gives fiction no character other than Mattie Ross, he will have drawn someone whom critics have not hesitated to mention in the same line with Huck Finn and other immortals of American fiction. Her spunk, vein of iron, honesty, loyalty, and determination join with her frontier spirit of self-reliance and her deep faith in her church and God to make her lastingly memorable. Even though she looms larger than life, a figure from a tall tale or legend, she seems true to life, at least the life of frontier America in its heroic era. She becomes the embodiment of true grit, an exemplar of the cliche that "When the going gets tough, the tough get going." Good and strong as she is, and partly because she is strong and good, she stands in vivid contrast to another character, Rooster Cogburn. Fat, oneeyed, and often sottish...