In fact, there's a mess of trouble in Luke's life, from worries about his uncle Ricky fighting in Korea to concerns about the nearby Latcher family and its illegitimate newborn baby, who may be Ricky's son. Most of it centers around Hank Spruill, a giant hillbilly with an equally massive temper, who one night in town beats a man dead and who throughout the book rubs up against a knife-wielding Mexican who is dating Hank's 17-year-old sister on the sly, leading to another murder. The three generations of the Chandler family treat their workers more kindly than most farmers do, including engaging in the local obsessionDplaying baseballDwith them, but serious trouble arises among the harvesters nonetheless. It's September 1952 in rural Arkansas when young narrator Luke Chandler notes that ""the hill people and the Mexicans arrived on the same day."" These folk are in Black Oak for the annual harvest of the cotton grown on the 80 acres that the Chandlers rent. Here there are hardscrabble farmers instead, and dirt-poor itinerant workers and a seven-year-old boy who grows up fast in a story as rich in conflict and incident as any previous Grisham and as nuanced as his very best. Who needs lawyers? Not Grisham, in his captivating new novel, now between hardcovers after serialization in the Oxford American.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |