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- Hardcover: 388 pages ; Dimensions (in
inches): 1.33 x 9.55 x 6.48
- Publisher: Doubleday; ISBN: 038550120X;
(February 6, 2001)
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Amazon.com
Ever since he published The
Firm in 1991, John Grisham has remained the undisputed champ of the
legal thriller. With A Painted House, however, he strikes out in a
new direction.
As the author is quick to note, this novel
includes "not a single lawyer, dead or alive," and readers will
search in vain for the kind of lowlife machinations that have been his
stock-in-trade. Instead, Grisham has delivered a quieter, more
contemplative story, set in rural Arkansas in 1952.
It's harvest time on the Chandler farm, and the
family has hired a crew of migrant Mexicans and "hill people" to
pick 80 acres of cotton. A certain camaraderie pervades this bucolic dream
team.
But it's backbreaking work, particularly for the
7-year-old narrator, Luke: "I would pick cotton, tearing the fluffy
bolls from the stalks at a steady pace, stuffing them into the heavy sack,
afraid to look down the row and be reminded of how endless it was, afraid
to slow down because someone would notice."
What's more, tensions begin to simmer between the Mexicans and the
hill people, one of whom has a penchant for bare-knuckles brawling. This
leads to a brutal murder, which young Luke has the bad luck to witness. At
this point--with secrets, lies, and at least one knife fight in the
offing--the plot begins to take on that familiar, Grisham-style
momentum.
Still, such matters ultimately take a back seat in A Painted
House to the author's evocation of time and place. This is, after all,
the scene of his boyhood, and Grisham waxes nostalgic without ever
succumbing to deep-fried sentimentality. Meanwhile, his account of Luke's
Baptist upbringing occasions some sly (and telling) humor:
I'd been taught in Sunday school from the day I could walk that lying
would send you straight to hell. No detours. No second chances. Straight
into the fiery pit, where Satan was waiting with the likes of Hitler and
Judas Iscariot and General Grant. Thou shalt not bear false witness,
which, of course, didn't sound exactly like a strict prohibition against
lying, but that was the way the Baptists interpreted it.
Whether Grisham will continue along these lines, or revert to the
judicial shark tank for his next book, is anybody's guess. But A
Painted House suggests that he's perfectly capable of telling an
involving story with nary a subpoena in sight. --James Marcus
Book
Description
The hill people
and the Mexicans arrived on the same day. It was a Wednesday, early in
September 1952. The Cardinals were five games behind the Dodgers with
three weeks to go, and the season looked hopeless.
The
cotton, however, was waist-high to my father, over my head, and he and my
grandfather could be heard before supper whispering words that were seldom
heard. It could be a "good crop."
Thus begins the new novel from John Grisham, a story inspired by his
own childhood in rural Arkansas. The narrator is a farm boy named Luke
Chandler, age seven, who lives in the cotton fields with his parents and
grandparents in a little house that's never been painted.
The Chandlers farm eighty acres that they rent, not own, and when the
cotton is ready they hire a truckload of Mexicans and a family from the
Ozarks to help harvest it.
For six weeks they pick cotton, battling the heat, the rain, the fatigue,
and, sometimes, each other. As the weeks pass Luke sees and hears things
no seven-year-old could possibly be prepared for, and finds himself
keeping secrets that not only threaten the crop but will change the lives
of the Chandlers forever.
A Painted House is a moving story of one boy's journey from
innocence to experience.
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