Just a Cotton Picken Year (A Painted House - John Grisham)

Name: marandina

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Product:	A Painted House - John Grisham
Date:	15/08/05 (968 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Wonderful evocation of those times

Disadvantages: May not be enough action for some

Yes, I admit I used to love “The Waltons”. Yessiree…I’ve laughed and cried, smiled and sighed and the adventures of John Boy Walton and his extended family living in those beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. I did stop short of watching “Little House On The Prairie” mind…honest. I guess it’s that homely Mark Twain kind of feeling that may have drawn me to my first attempt at reading a John Grisham book recently.

“A Painted House” is the story of a farming community in 1950s Arkansas. Apparently inspired by his own childhood, John Grisham recounts a tale of life on a cotton farm down in the deep South of the USA in 1952. Luke Chandler is the only child on the farm living with his mother and father together with his grandfather, Pappy and his grandmother. Life is hard and come picking season they have to take on extra hands to pick the crop. Looking for help, the Chandlers hire a group of workers from Mexico as well as the Hill Billy, Spruill family from the Ozarks. Both new groups bring with them a mix of hard workers and troublemakers in the shape of the tough nut, Hank Spruill and the knife wielding Cowboy of the Mexican clan. It’s these two who provide most of the drama as the book unravels to tell the tale of the ups and downs of the Chandler family throughout those Summer months.

As mentioned above, Grisham is not an author I’d tried before but that was because I assumed he wrote mainly thrillers and that isn’t really my genre as a rule. Renowned for books like “The Firm”, “The Pelican Brief” and “The Rainmaker”, John Grisham has had phenomenal success in reaching a wide audience with many of his books making it into film format. His first book was published in 1988, “A Time to Kill” and ever since he has managed to generally write at least one novel a year with a theme based around legal thrillers usually involving court room dramas. Born in 1955 in Arkansas, Grisham graduated in law in 1981 going on to practice law in Southhaven. With this background it’s clear to see that this particular writer has the inside knowledge to include copious detail in his form of thriller.

On the face of it, this doesn’t sound the most thrilling of stories does it? Told in the first person by Luke, there is a clear sense of reminiscence on the part of the author with many nuances from his own childhood thrown in. Luke’s love of baseball as his clamours for the radio each night to listen to the St Louis Cardinals game is just one example of how the writer uses the story as a vehicle to elaborate on his own memories from his upbringing. I couldn’t help but feel that it’s this affection that the story is told with that gives this book such a warm glow.

“A Painted House” could almost be Luke’s diary with the way that the chapters unfold in chronological sequence. Grisham’s understanding of what would be running through cotton farmers’ minds simply adds a depth to the story that makes the underlying tale very readable. What would be mundane to us is life and death to Luke’s father and Pappy, the quiet, brooding patriarch of the family who is caught in the loop of farming to break even and inevitable debt. The fact that he together with most of the men in the town continually fret about the weather adds an air of credibility that takes you inside the Methodist realism of those times.

I couldn’t help but get caught up in the heroes and villains of this piece. Hank makes a very believable young thug complimenting Cowboy’s penchant for violence whilst carrying on an affair with the teenage Tally Spruill makes him a good foil for the innocence of the naïve storyteller. Luke’s fate is interwoven with these two characters with tragic consequences. Meanwhile, the reader is made aware of Luke becoming more self-aware as he grows up a little more each day. After all, uncle Ricky is off fighting for his country in Korea contrasting against the increasing futility of the annual struggle against the elements to bring in enough cotton to pay off the Chandler’s existing debts and move the family up in the pecking order of that time and place. Secretly, Luke’s parents hope that he grows up to become a baseball player rather than a farmer.

For much of the book I could picture being there amongst the rows of cotton picking inhuman quantities of crop just to earn a few cents each day. Grisham uses a descriptive power that evokes a mental canvas of rural Arkansas that is beautifully observed by the writer. I lived the excitement of the weekly Saturday trip into town, the annual baseball showdown between the Methodists and Baptists and Luke’s first encounter with a television; all good examples of how Grisham achieves authenticity forged from first hand experience.

There were aspects that I found limiting in the telling of this particular tome. John Grisham has a simplicity of expression that surprised me although this added hugely to the ease with which the pages unfolded. I guess the technical nature of the author’s background together with the legal nature of most of his work would have suggested a more ostentatious style of writing and maybe it does in other books he’s written but I didn’t find that the case here. Most sentences were short and pointed with a punchy style of writing only occasionally marred with starting a sentence with a conjunction such as “or” (taboo as far as I knew). There’s no expansive pen pictures of characters or any particularly insightful potted histories to support the present tense but the dialogue and poignancy of the times is enough to create an image in most readers’ minds. It’s easy to relate to the episodes in the story and stimulate an empathy that makes you root for Luke, throw metaphorical tomatoes at Hank and sympathise with the poor dirt farmers, the Latchers.

“A Painted House” runs to 388 pages in hardback form and is published by *Century. As far as genre goes it’s more general fiction that anything else. The book would certainly appeal to all ages and has a charm belied by the title although the subplot involving the invalid Trot Spruill that runs throughout the book becoming an inspiration for the future does explain away the nature of the title. Quite frankly, I loved it and found reading a few chapters each night just right for such a captivating story. If you laughed and cried, smiled and sighed at the antics of the Waltons or even Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” then you will probably like this. I certainly did.

Thanks for reading

Marandina

ISBN 0-7126-7039-4

*More info about the publishers @ www.randomhouse.co.uk
The hardback originally retailed at £16.99. I’m sure you can get either hardback or paperback much cheaper now at the usual outlets such as Amazon or even Ebay.

Summary: Story of a boy on an Arkansas farm in 1952