Rob Stout
A Painted House by John Grisham (Century)
What does an author do when he has become so successful that he has worked his genre to the point of endless repetition? John Grisham, the current patent-holder of legal thrillers in the United States, has left the safety of the courtroom for rural Arkansas to exploit another genre the coming-of-age novel set in the American South.
Basing the book, set in 1952, partly on his own Arkansas childhood, Grisham offers Luke Chandler, a rather smart boy of seven, as his narrator. In a foreword Grisham admits a closer affinity to Luke over other protagonists, but distances himself from autobiography:”One or two of these events may have taken place, though I’ve heard so many different versions of them I believe none of them myself.”
Luke shows us his family’s struggle to finish their cotton harvest before bad weather and debt take their toll. To do so, they hire a group of itinerant Mexican workers and a hill family from the nearby Ozarks. This particular season will be full of cultural clashes and undiscovered secrets as Luke accidentally happens upon a couple having sex (one of the more time-worn coming-of-age experiences), watches the birth of an illegitimate child, is witness to a murder and sees his first television set. There is also the mystery of who is secretly painting the bare plank boards that cover the Chandlers’ farmhouse.
With skilled care, Grisham evokes the joys and hardships undergone by Luke and his family with simple, but carefully evoked devices such as communal meals of ham, tomatoes, and biscuits, the values of family and tradition, and the game of baseball, which runs as a thread throughout the novel.
Only the hardened cynic would draw undue attention to the similarities between this novel and a book such as the under-appreciated Jim the Boy by Tony Early. A Painted House shares an unusual number of coincidences in plot and character with Jim the Boy, in which we read of one year in the life of 10-year-old Jim Glass and his large, eccentric family. Set in the deep South, Jim’s life has other parallels with Luke’s, including the discovery of adult sexuality and a passion for baseball.
Although Grisham has never shied away from using stock elements, he uses them to greater effect here than in his previous work, developing characters and dialogue drawn from affection, not contractual obligation. His prose is also somewhat improved ?unlike his legal thrillers, this is not a place sentences go to die. While this novel may not stand the test of great literature, he has for once made us care about his characters and their plight.