Tom Sawyer on the Cheap
HEMINGWAY, MARK
Mark Hemingway Tom Sawyer on the Cheap JOHN GRISHAM'S A PAINTED HOUSE Though his novels are at best glorified screenplays, rife with odious liberal populist messages, and commit the unforgivable...
...Grisham apparently has similar designs on becoming a bona fide member of the literati...
...Judging from his latest novel, Mr...
...It didn't sell...
...the New Yorker, rewarded at last by the literary establishment for his persistence and imaginative derring-do...
...Grisham hasn't nearly King's talent...
...Certain aspects of organized religion are oppressive, especially among fire and brimstone Southern Baptists...
...Also unlike Tom, Luke ruins his novel...
...As the press release for the book gleefully notes: "There is not a single lawyer, dead or alive, in this story...
...But then Grisham has the switch perpetually set on "exposition," the mark of a writer who long ago decided to write down to his audience, and has stooped so long he can no longer rise...
...The answer is C, the title 'A Painted House' is supposed to be a metaphor...
...For instance, Mexican migrant workers are kind and misunderstood, while the itinerant Ozark hillbillies are boorish, moonshine-swilling thugs...
...This last claim is entirely disingenuous...
...has a winning formula, and he churns out compulsively readable, if preposterous, fictions, so formulaic that there is hardly any point to reviewing them other than to say, for those who like this sort of thing, that this is the sort of thing they like...
...So he made himself into a rotten writer for the money...
...Growing up means having to make decisions that are morally ambiguous...
...Compounding all of this nonsense is his fondness for one of the hillbilly daughters, a 17-year-old girl named 90 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ April 2001 Tally...
...Instead, A Painted House is a coming of age story allegedly inspired by Grisham's own childhood, narrated by seven-year-old Luke Chandler, a "Tom Sawyer-like farm boy who narrates the novel in his own distinctively youthful voice...
...A few years back Stephen King won an O. Henry Award and became a regular in Grisham has the mark of a writer who long ago decided to write down to his audience, and has stooped so long he can no longer rise...
...Doubleday, 388 pages, $27...
...For starters, the narration is simultaneously a wistful recollection of an older man and a "distinctively youthful voice," making the tone perpetually muddled...
...we'd never have guessed...
...We must tolerate interracial romance...
...Nor are there judges, trials, courtrooms, conspiracies or nagging social issues...
...he is perpetually confused by such minor transgressions as swearing and working on the Sabbath and yet he remains oddly composed after he witnesses a man being beat to death...
...And at the center of this hellbroth of poignant observations is Luke Chandler, who indeed is just like Tom Sawyer except that he is not humorous, mischievous, a compelling narrative voice, or named Tom...
...He'd best leave Tom Sawyer alone...
...Luke's family are poor cotton sharecroppers in rural Arkansas circa 1952, but infinitely compassionate and wise, and many a lesson is learned as Luke spends a summer picking cotton with a group of Mexicans and hillbillies hired by the family to bring in the crop and stave off floodwaters...
...He got the money and there's no going back...
...Though he gets the period details right, the prose is beyond clunky, weighed down under laboriously pointless detail, ham-handed symbolism, and metaphors designed for the reading comprehension section of the SAT: "Aha...
...Grisham's first novel, A Time to Kill, was ambitious, heartfelt, and altogether a perfectly respectable if not quite memorable effort...
...At age seven, Luke lusts after this girl as if he is already in the throes of puberty Tally mystifyingly doesn't mind if Luke watches her when she's bathing in the creek alone, the occasion for Luke to observe: "Once you've seen a pretty girl naked, you feel a certain attachment to her...
...Grisham's new novel, A Painted House, suggests the poor man has but little satisfaction in his huge piles of money and worldwide acclaim...
...Mark Hemingway Tom Sawyer on the Cheap JOHN GRISHAM'S A PAINTED HOUSE Though his novels are at best glorified screenplays, rife with odious liberal populist messages, and commit the unforgivable sin of making heroes out of lawyers—the man Alas Mr...
...Luke has such a gee-golly-gosh innocence he's impossible to empathize with...
...Crucial information that...
Vol. 34 • April 2001 • No. 3
