Grisham's new rites-of-passage novel is unlike anything he has done before. Basically detailing a momentous year in the life of seven-year-old Luke Chandler, it paints an evocative and loving portrait of the lives of various groups of people living in rural Arkansas in the early 1950s. Semi-autobiographical, according to the blurb, the novel is slow-paced and written in a simple, rather lyrical prose style that ideally suits its content. Luke lives with his parents and grandparents on a small farm. Pappy is the patriarch, a stern, though ultimately loving figure, whose main preoccupation is getting the cotton crop in on time. To achieve this he hires a family of hill people, and also a band of Mexican labourers, and it is the tension engendered between these disparate groupings that drives the main thrust of the book. Working for hours on end under a merciless sun is bound to stoke up tensions, and there is also an unlikely love affair between a girl of the hill people and a member of the Mexican camp. All the characters are very well drawn, which wasn't exactly the case in Grisham's earlier, story-driven works. Luke's mother dreams of leaving the hardship of farm life and going to live in the North, while Luke's ambition is to eventually be good enough at baseball to play for his beloved St Louis Cardinals. Although there is quite an lot of drama, the book has a slow, elemental fall to it, a nicely tuned sweep that shows Grisham to be completely at home with his material. This is a new departure for him, and possibly one that he will not maintain. But somehow I get the feeling that a sequel may be on the cards, somewhere down the line. In the meantime, A Painted House details a way of life that is probably gone forever.
Vincent Banville is a writer and critic