Central to all Portis's novels are abiding concerns for standards of decency in human conduct, fair play, justice, self-reliance, adaptability, restlessness, and the need to be attached to a place and a group of kindred souls.

All of these concerns surface in True Grit, many of them in the person of Mattie Ross, the self-reliant youngster from near Dardanelle in Yell County, Arkansas, who will brook nothing short of revenge for the murder of her father by the restless and uprooted farm hand Tom Chaney. Naive as she is in her fourteenth year when she sets out to avenge her father's death, Mattie must learn how to deal with adults and institutions and to exact from them fair play, whether it be in horse-trading or man-hunting. That same sense of fair play lies behind Ray Midge's attempt to retrieve his Ford Torino and his wife when...