A Painted House

¶ … Painted House by John Grisham

The semi-skillful use of an unskilled child's perspective on racial tensions in pre-civil rights Arkansas

Contrary to the expectations that might be generated by the author's name, which virtually constitutes a 'brand name' of a kind of fast-paced yet moralistic legal thriller, A Painted House is narrated by a seven-year-old child, named Luke, and does not contain a single lawyer in its storyline. Rather than being set in the fast-paced world of corporate or criminal law and injustice, Grisham's setting for A Painted House is that of a farming community in the state of Arkansas during the early 1950's. However, the theme of injustice is still present, perhaps even more palpably than some of Grisham's more overt attempts at setting a pulse-pounding pace of events in the legal world.

This work of literature work begins in a rural setting, where the young narrator is picking cotton, along with migrants and transients of diverse races, including many Mexican individuals. Grisham does not romanticize this backbreaking work, to his credit, nor is he nostalgic about relations between the races, as emotional conflagrations develop between the non-white pickers and the Sproul family, amongst others, recruited from the Ozarks to make some headway in the over eighty acres of the crop on the Chandler farm. Furthermore, as the farm belongs to the boy's family, Luke Chandler experiences a sense of discomfort and guilt, because he knows his family is profiting off of the labor of others, gotten for a pittance.

Luke's stance as a seven-year-old sensitive to racial injustice strains the reader's credulity at times. Sometimes all Luke seems to care about is becoming a great baseball player for his favorite team, the St. Louis Cardinals. Other times he expresses horror at the attitudes of racial bigots like the white cotton-picker Hank. He has a transparently ironic view of his family's Christian faith. He expresses anxiety at the simmering Korean War, which is tangentially on the horizon and in the story's background, as a kind of international, political mirror of the Red Scared era Luke and his family are living in, in the South, and also a metaphor of the racial injustices and discomforts that riddle all of America. The title of the book refers to the class divisions that mark Arkansas as well as the racial divisions that mark the town. The non-farming, more aristocratic members of the town Luke lives in paint their houses, while the more practical farmers do not.

The use of irony in a child's perspective has daunted, of course, some of even the most technically accomplished writers, and Grisham's book is still intensely enjoyable and at times funny to read. However, Luke's age always seems more fluid than concrete -- in other words, the boy takes on the curiosity of a much older young man when he sees a young woman, for instance, bathing in a creek, or an unmarried teenage girl giving birth. Although the latter anecdote in particular highlights the hypocrisy of the small Southern town and seems well-placed in the narration, Luke's semi-sexually knowing point-of-view, combined with claims of ignorance seems to ring less 'true' than some of his other observations, such as his point-of-view of religion. The ignorance seems clearly assumed by the author, or 'put on' by an older, authorial voice consciously taking on the eye of a child, rather than unforced.