A Painted House is not so much a novel, or even so much an attempt by John Grisham to write the Great American Novel, as it is a memory picture, a long last look at a childhood in the rural South in the 1950's. A Painted House is lovingly narrated by young Luke Chandler, age 7, as he looks back across the span of years at the eventful harvest season of 1952 in Black Oak, Arkansas.  
 
The initial problem confronted by Luke Chandler and his family is one of economics. With the good economic times we've had in this decade, we've forgotten that economics is usually described as a "dismal science", and dismal is one word that describes the fortunes of the Chandler family farm. The situation is so simple that the seven-year-old is easily able to grasp it. Family patriarch Eli Chandler has taken out his annual crop loan to pay for the cost of renting the land and running the farm through the growing season. Come harvest time, all eighty acres of the cotton crop must be harvested and taken to the cotton gin. The cotton is the lifeblood of the farm. If it rots in the fields, if floodwaters shoud wash it away, if the cotton brokers up in the sinful city of Memphis conspire to lower prices, the Chandler family faces mounting debts. Even if there is a bumper crop of cotton, that'll tend to lower prices and yield less income. And if, somehow, the harvest is a success, it will only mean a few more luxuries, and the chance to do it all over again next spring.  
 
This may make the novel sound grim, which is not the case. The economic realities of cotton farming primarily serve to highlight the social realities of cotton farming, which the novel addresses from its first sentence. Even with the best good will in the world, Luke and his parents and grandparents would never be able to pick 80 acres of cotton by themselves. Work must be hired in order for the harvest to come in successfully, and in northeastern Arkansas, that means "hill people" and Mexican migrant laborers.  
 
The South has always had a class structure, enough so that one wonders if Karl Marx wasn't really born in South Carolina and wasn't fooling those folks over in Europe. The Chandlers are somewhere in the middle; as Southern Baptist tenant farmers, they're below the Methodist shopkeepers in town and above their sharecropper neighbors. (We don't meet any African-Americans until later in the book; Grisham claims that blacks were rare in that part of Arkansas, and I don't have any way to know if he's cheating.) The Pentecostal hillbillies and the Catholic Mexicans rank towards the bottom of that structure; Luke's mother feels the need to remind people from time to time that the Mexicans are human beings, too. (In case you're wondering, the people at the very bottom of Southern class structure are Yankees, and people who root for the baseball Yankees aren't much higher on the list.)  
 
But it would be wrong to characterize A Painted House as a story of class struggle. The conflict between the hill people and the Mexicans is just one of a mosaic of conflicts that the novel lovingly illustrates. Grisham shows us the divisions within the Chandler family itself; shows us the endless quiet turf battles between Luke's mother and grandmother over the kitchen and garden, the long twilight struggle of Luke's grandmother against her ornery husband, and the problems left behind by Luke's hellraising Uncle Ricky before he went off to war in Korea. Even the title represents an intergenerational conflict between those who want the Chandler's house to be painted for the first time and those who don't see the need. On top of those conflicts, Grisham presents the ancient divisions between town and farm, between man and weather, between boys and girls, between innocence and experience, between North and South, between the Cubs and the Cardinals. (It is to Grisham's credit that Stan Musial and Harry Caray are characters as important as any other in the novel.)  
 
The conflicts that Grisham creates are all fairly obvious from the start, all the more so because the characters in the novel are close to being stereotypical. (The Claude Rains Principle applies here; stereotypical characters in a John Grisham novel? I'm shocked, shocked.) The nice thing about A Painted House is that it presents and resolves these conflicts in such a leisurely manner. Far from being a thriller, A Painted House moves at a slow, unhurried pace that is entirely appropriate to the subject matter. In meteorological terms, although Grisham sets off the odd tornado here and there, the real tension builds up like slow-moving floodwaters rising in a valley.  
 
What moves the novel along, surprisingly, is not so much the Grisham talent for storytelling but an evocative, almost lyrical style and a stunning talent for observation and recollection. Luke Chandler doesn't have much dialogue in the novel -- in fact, most of the story involves him keeping his mouth shut -- but his descriptions of life in rural Arkansas are wonderfully detailed and insightful. Details such as the acts at the town carnival, the Chandler patriarch's theory on the proper speed to drive a pickup truck, the types of ice cream available at the Baptist church picnic, and a thousand other little gems are one of the reasons that the novel sparkles. Here's Grisham on a small, but telling subject:  
 
My worst chore of the late afternoon was in the garden... It was on the east side of our home, the quiet side, away from the kitchen door and the barnyard and the chicken coop. Away from Pappy's pickup and the small dirt drive where the rare visitor parked. It was enclosed in a wire fence four feet tall, built by my father under my mother's direction, and designed to keep out deer and varmints. Corn was planted around the fence so that once you closed the rickety gate with the leather latch, you stepped into a secret world hidden by the stalks.  
 
My job was to take a straw basket and follow my mother around as she gathered whatever she deemed ripe. She had a basket, too, and slowly filled it with tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, peppers, onions and eggplant. She talked quietly, not necessarily to me, but to the garden in general.  
 
"Look at the corn, would you? We'll eat those next week."  
 
"Yes ma'am...."  
 
My mother loved this little plot of soil because it was hers -- no one else really wanted it. She treated it like a sanctuary. When the house got crowded, I could always find her in the garden, talking to the vegetables. Harsh words were rare in our family. When it happened, I knew my mother would disappear into her refuge.  
 
I thought very highly of A Painted House, unfortunately, I am unsure that my appreciation of the novel will necessarily be shared by everyone. The biggest attraction that A Painted House had for me was that it allowed me to draw parallels between my own childhood experience and that of the protagonist. I didn't grow up picking cotton, thank goodness, but I did grow up poor and Southern Baptist in Mansfield, Texas. I was the son of a preacher man, and we lived on the parsonage of New Hope Baptist Church in 1974, with a big garden where my mother grew okra. My father preached every Sunday and spent the rest of the week working in a scrap metal yard to make ends meet. We didn't live there very long, and ended up moving into a house trailer on the extreme fringes of Dallas County, where my father pastored another struggling Baptist church before he left the pulpit for a teaching career. I remember all of that, remember what it was like growing up in a trailer park, and how it felt to move into a real house of our own for the first time.  
 
And I thought about my great-grandfather, the first Curtis Edmonds, who was born in Alabama almost 120 years ago, and who assuredly did pick cotton there, and on a dirt farm near Milford, Texas, and on another farm in Archer County. I thought about what he would think of where I live and what I do for a living. And I thought about my little nephew, and the advantages that he has, and will have, and how alien and far away the world that Grisham describes will seem to him when he grows up.  
 
I hope that he will read A Painted House, and think about it.  
