A Painted House

Pleasant enough, but it needs something else to offset the endless, grinding, back-breaking rural nostalgia. If it had been written 50 years earlier it would have been a wonderful starting point for a Rogers and Hammerstein musical.

Obviously, if you have a story with a child narrator set in the rural southern US, you are expecting poverty, prejudice, rape, murder, and miscarriages of justice. Or some kind of melodramatic climax, anyway. This book does have its moments, it's true, but they all seem to fizzle out rather: Nothing that happens in the story really has any serious consequences for the main characters. Life goes on, there'll be another church picnic next year, and the Cardinals will have another crack at winning the baseball show more competition. That's pretty much how real life works, but transferred to fiction it's rather dull. It's a bit strange to have something that looks as though it's meant to be a coming-of-age novel, but where the characters don't develop at all in the course of the story. Young Luke is just as worldly-wise at the beginning as he is at the end.

A child narrator automatically implies that the author has to cheat a bit to get the right mix of immature perception and adult hindsight, so that we believe it's really a child talking to us, but get a story that is interesting enough to retain the attention of an adult reader over a few hundred pages. Grisham evidently doesn't have the Harper Lee touch, and entirely fails to make Luke a plausible seven-year-old. Eleven or twelve he might just get away with, but even allowing for the fact that we're talking tough kids in the depths of the countryside, seven is just too young for the voice Luke talks to us in. show less

I'm a big fan of Grisham and have read almost all of his works, but I
wasn't too excited about the three that he's written (so far) that move away
from his established territory of the legal thriller. Last month I read
"Bleachers." This week I finally got around to reading "A Painted House."
I bought it in paperback, which is unusual for me and a Grisham book. I
usually buy them hot off the press.

This one is a quiet tale, the story of a poor cotton farming family in
Arkansas in 1952. It is told from the perspective of a 7 year old boy, son
and grandson of the family. It's time to pick the cotton crop and everybody
works like dogs. The family hires some "hill people," a scruffy family
named Spruill, and manages to hire 10 Mexican illegals who show more came into town on
a cattle truck. It's late summer and hotter than Hell itself. One of the
hill people is a huge hulk of a man with a sour attitude and a chip the size
of a cinder block on his shoulder, and one of the Mexicans carries a
switchblade and isn't afraid to use it. When the coming autumn brings
unseasonal torrential rain, the entire crop is threatened, and with it,
their very way of life.

There's tension and tenderness in this book, and Grisham tells the story so
well I felt like I was there. This certainly wasn't his usual work, but it
was a very satisfying read, nonetheless. I hated to see it end. I'd give
it a 4. show less

I think I would have liked this more in print, as the audio narrator had a couple of annoying vocal tics that distracted me. It's a novel about a 7 year old boy growing up in rural Arkansas on a cotton farm and the harvest season when Bad Things happen. The characters mostly seemed two-dimensional, and the endless descriptions of picking cotton got rather boring. That said, Grisham knows how to draft a compelling read in terms of plot and pacing and, despite some lags, that talent was evident here. I wish the audio book had a better narrator.

3 stars

A heartfelt tale of life of an Arkansas cotton farming family, set in 1952. Grisham has spun an extraordinary tale and totally captivates the reader if describing listening to a Cardinals baseball game on the radio or one of the many surprising events that take place throughout the book. The pacing is brilliant and is told through the eyes of seven year old Luke Chandler.

This is a true departure from his legal thrillers. Nary an attorney in sight, no courts, no Mafia, no big sinister corporations - just the languorous heat of an Arkansas delta summer-fall, and a crop of cotton to get picked before the weather turns nasty and 6 months of hard back-breaking work are washed away. Luke, at age 7, is a marvelous narrator. The characters are so life-like. Grisham can't completely abandon murder and intrigue, but it is just a small part of the whole here. Our book club really enjoyed this book.

You won’t find any lawyers or courtrooms in John Grisham’s newest novel, A Painted House. No sireebob, this is a horse (or, house) of a different color.

It seems the attorney-turned-publishing commodity has reached the point in his career where the annual publication of an automatically-bestselling legal thriller is, perhaps, getting a bit old-hat. What we need here, folks, is something completely different to revive routine blood—something like, oh I dunno, a coming-of-age tale told by the seven-year-old son of an Arkansas cotton farmer; something without legal eagles; something with only sporadic thrills; something to show the world that even though Grisham writes airplane-ride fiction, he secretly pines to be accepted as a show more serious literary author.

It’s a risky move. Most members of the Rocket-Propelled Bestsellers Club (Tom Clancy, Stephen King, Sue Grafton, et al) rarely stray far from the well-cropped pastures of their established genres. Even when King goes legit (Different Seasons, Hearts in Atlantis), there remain shades of darkness and monsters. So, you’ve got to admire a fellow like Grisham who tosses the dice with a book like A Painted House. Will he disappoint long-time fans expecting more Southern-fried justice? Will he recruit readers who wouldn’t ordinarily pick up a paperback where the words “#1 Bestsellerâ€? dominate half the front cover? Will Clancy decide to jump in the fray by writing a bodice-ripping romance?

Only time (and a blitz of hype from Grisham’s publisher) will tell.

I should mention that I’ve never read any of Mr. Grisham’s other books (not even on long airplane trips). I’m only familiar with his works by way of Hollywood (ranging from the horrid A Time to Kill to the excellent The Rainmaker). So, while I can’t tell you how A Painted House compares to The Brethren, I’m happy to report it’s a cotton-pickin’ good read on its own merits. It will never reach solid gold classic status like Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, but it does bring to life a time, a place and a set of characters who burn bright in your mind…at least until you turn the final page and move on to the next book waiting patiently on your bedside table.

A Painted House is the story of a single harvesting season in the autumn of 1952 when the Cardinals are trailing the Dodgers by five games (baseball, that easy nostalgia tool of writers, figures prominently). The narrator is pint-sized Luke Chandler, the only son of Jesse and Kathleen and grandson to Pappy and Gran. One other significant family member, Luke’s Uncle Ricky, is away on the front lines of the Korean War—a constant fret-and-worry for the whole family. They’re a close, patriarchal family who enjoy the rewards of hard work followed by Sunday dinners and listening to Harry Caray announce ball games on nighttime radio.

From the start, I realized A Painted House has the down-home goodness of The Waltons and contains as many of that show’s gentle pleasures. It also has a fair share of flat-footed prose and corny sentiment. The characters have the depth of an RC Cola bottle (half-drunk, no less) and they move in ways we’ve all seen before. But yet, gosh durn it, I found myself getting caught up in their simple life and its many predicaments.

The story opens as Pappy hires migrant workers—Mexicans and “hill peopleâ€?—to pick the crop on the struggling farm. No single event defines the plot. Instead, A Painted House has many rooms, a series of “life bookmarksâ€? for young Luke. The episodic nature of the novel is due to the fact it was first serialized in Oxford American, the bi-monthly magazine the author publishes. In the space of six weeks and 400 pages, Luke witnesses two murders, a childbirth, a tornado, a flood, his first nekkid girl and his first televised baseball game.

Land sakes! At thirty-seven, I realize I’ve led a pretty dull life by comparison.

Grisham does cram a lot of “coming-of-age-ismsâ€? into this young boy’s life and the tone occasionally adopts a too-sophisticated veneer, but it’s all in the name of easy-to-read fiction. Don’t come expecting Great Literature on the order of that “otherâ€? Oxford, Mississippi scribe, William Faulkner, and you won’t be disappointed. On the other hand, if you’re thinking this is going to be just another annual Grisham event, you might be pleasantly surprised—kind of like how you felt that moment you saw your first nekkid girl. show less

What I liked most about this book is that it wasn't formula Grisham. I have enjoyed most of this "lawyer" books as a fun read...but this book has more depth than that and pleased me in another, entirely different, way.