How does it compare to audio works by the same author?
Quite good
Advantages:
nostalgic, easy to read, interesting
Disadvantages:
may be slow - paced for you if you're expecting Grisham's usual style
Recommend to potential buyers:
no
Full review
Wow, a John Grisham book without lawyers. For those of you that are unacquainted with his books, he is an all-American-lawyer-who’s-seen-sense-and-turned-to-writing author. Needless to say, his books focus around lawyers, intrigue and/or criminality. The film ‘The Firm’, with Tom Cruise, was based upon his book of the same name. With ‘A Painted House’ however, he turns his back on the mean, greedy, double-crossing affairs of the sinfully money obsessed world of modern, American, big buck lawyers and plunges back in time to the hard-graft era of the struggling rural 1950s America.
Luke, a seven year old boy of traditional Southern farming stock, narrates the book. We enter the lives of his family in September 1952; a significant period, and a significant season.
-The Korean War is leaving families in a perpetual state of apprehension, ensuring that the news is on every evening. -America is in a state of extreme technological division, with recent advents such as the television making their marks on the nation, yet widening the disparities between rural and urban areas, poor and rich people, Northern and Southern states. -The farming community is in a panic – it is harvesting time.
The above basically sets the context – the book is a reflection of world, national and regional affairs, all presented through a description of a few months in the lives of the Chandler family.
The harvesting is about to start so extra help is needed in the fields. Desperately needed. The Spruills, a rough, troublesome familly of hillbillies, and a group of Mexicans who have travelled up North in search of work are taken on. The three factions (The Chandlers, The Spruills and the Mexicans) all have to interact, live, work and tolerate eachother during this trying time. Tensions soon start brewing between them.... Even within the Chandler family troublesome cracks soon seem to appear in the close-knit family fabric. Torn by the pressures of modernisation, unstable economic conditions and intrenched forces of rural tradition bearing down upon each member, different desires rise to the surface to produce a picture of conflicting views accross generations and personalities, and of the pressures to which some families at the time must have been subject.
The Chandler family reminded me of The Waltons – images of sagging at the knees, dirty pants (well, might as well use the American word) and ruffled, unkempt hair sprang to mind whilst imagining Grandpop Chandler bumbling through the rickety old house. The book is steeped in traditional nostalgia, and absorbs the reader into the lives of this family and the hardships that they have to go through to make ends meet on the farm. It gives one a good taste of the all-American farming lifestyles similar to this. The style in which the book was written took a little bit of getting used to at first – the narration by the boy is done so that you can imagine him relating these events to you – Grisham looks through the eyes of the lad to see what things he would have picked up on and focuses upon how he feels about certain events, and is written in the kind of style in which a kiddie would think and speak. Except this may not be quite the case at all times – I often found myself wondering if a seven year old would really think like that?! If you read it as though the boy is now a man thinking back to the old days parts of it may not quite gel, and if you keep it in mind that this was just a little lad it might be a distraction too. Or maybe I am just very picky. Whatever, it’s best to appreciate that this is a tale, a nice story – you take things too seriously and it can spoil it.
Now, I knew before even buying this that it was going to be different to Grisham’s other offerings. Still, I did not really know how different.
-A Painted House – it sounds so like his regular trademark titles, most of which are short and start with A or The. -The cover of my copy – a distant pair of ambiguous looking buildings, set against a lonely, isolated country backdrop. That implies a sense of mystery in itself, even leading me to anticipate the likelihood of sinister goings on. -The Back Cover Description of my copy – “…heat, rain, fatigue, a killing and the unravelling of a family secret threaten to destroy the Chandler’s hopes…”. That certainly sent my imagination racing ahead to the prospects of potentially life shattering repercussions.
So what, I asked myself, is so different about this book compared to his usual yarns??
With all the above duly taken on board, I started the book anticipating a similar story to what I’m used to from Grisham, but just set in the rural America of the 1950s.
That’s why I wish that I could have read my opinion before reading the book!
The above elements are present throughout but there is certainly a different emphasis, which should change the way the reader goes about reading the book. The emphasis is on story telling – upon description, narration, nostalgia, understanding, scene setting – rather than suspense and intrigue. Here, Grisham has produced a far more meaningful book, which merits a greater sense of appreciation and time devoted to it.
I say that about the time, because this ties in with why my misconceptions marred the book for me – I read it like I would any of his others. I breezed through the slow parts, had my mind on when the fast bits would come and what they could result in, read it quite quickly like it was one of his fast-paced action books and didn’t slow down to take in what I was reading as fully as I would have liked to in hindsight.
All his trademark qualities are present – he does in fact do very well at weaving all kinds of shocking, humorous, unpleasant, potentially catastrophic etc events into his descriptive take on the story, and so this book is not purely a nice narrative about country living in good ol’ US of A. But the difference between this book and his normal ones is this deeper consideration that he has given to the characters, the scene, the lifestyles, the complexities of their ways of making a living.
The reader should know that this book is going to be primarily a story, an account – not a thriller. They should know that they should be appreciating the atmosphere, the descriptions, and the insights that they are being given on this kind of living beforehand, so that they can understand what the book is aiming to convey at the start. Maybe I’m in the minority and everyone else did have the book sussed straight away, but it took me a good few chapters of scene setting, description, and narrative before I realised that this was the way the book was going to stay. I think the marketing of the book was all wrong – it’s not like his usual books and so shouldn’t have been marketed in the same way – greater differentiation would have enhanced the value of the book making people appreciate the new style of writing that he is airing here.
Arrow January 2002 ISBN: 0099416158 490 pages £5.59 from Amazon
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How does it compare to similar audio books?
Quite good
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shenanigans than with the roots of that country life which taught him much of what he knows about being human. In the early autumn of 1952, seven-year-old Luke Chandler is ...
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