John Grisham: A Painted House

Random House

$49.95

Review: Gilbert Wong

When you drive into Oxford, Mississippi, you immediately know that this is where John Grisham called home.

The town square is a southern cliche: a patch of grass sprouting an oak, surrounded by two-storeyed, weatherboard shops and offices, sheltered by verandas. The residents are unhurried.

Another famous author to call Oxford home was William Faulkner. On the outskirts of town you can visit Faulkner's house, though, as the accompanying article reports, Grisham has long since left Oxford behind. What he has not left behind is his ambition to be a southern writer like Faulkner.

Yes, he writes legal thrillers but Grisham's novels have always spoken to the sensibilities, values and experience that belong to the American South. His latest novel. A Painted House is lawyer-free and takes inspiration from elements in Grisham's southern childhood.

The story focuses on the Chandlers, a poor family of cotton farmers in Arkansas of the 1950s. Narrated by Luke Chandler, the 7-year-old son, the novel follows the cotton harvest of 1952. The Chandlers rent their 32ha and live in an unpainted weatherboard house. To help with the harvest they hire a crew of Mexicans and a hillbilly family from the even poorer Ozarks.

It's not an easy way to make a living. The Chandlers' land is low-lying; they and their workers battle stifling heat, rain and floods to raise a crop that will barely allow them to stay on the land another year.

Taken to its bones the story of the summer a boy loses his innocence as adults crumble under pressure from the elements and each other is hardly fresh.

However, Grisham's skill has always been his narrative drive. He is a masterful gatherer of plot threads that here deal with the darker realities of rural life: racism, the need to escape the stifling confines, sudden violence.

But this is Luke's story and as experience shapes him he feels the stirrings of sexual curiosity, the real fear of death, and the realisation that his parents and grandparents are not infallible. The reader is reminded of those same rites of passage.

Even if some of the elements are grim, the same cannot be said for this novel. Grisham evokes the bad and the good in rural life. He takes a light, satiric poke at small-town life, while celebrating the kindness and rituals that bind small communities together.

This is a departure for Grisham, a major one, but one that should be welcome. It may well be that his ambition was to write another page-turner. He has succeeded, but he also signals his intent for the future. He clearly wants to be part of the great tradition of writers from the American South. He may yet succeed.