Having long since won over the masses with his fast-paced, no-brainer, best-selling legal thrillers, John Grisham is apparently out to earn his highbrow literary spurs by winning over critics, too. His latest book, A Painted House, has been widely touted for its lawyerlessness; for Grisham, it's a bold experiment that dumps virtually everything common to his successful novels except the Southern setting in a clear play for literary respectability. House's story is told from the perspective of Luke Chandler, a suspiciously precocious 7-year-old living on a rural Arkansas cotton farm with his parents and grandparents. The year is 1952, the crop and the weather are good, and Luke's grandfather has just hired a family of migrant "hill people" and a trailer full of newly imported Mexicans for the harvest. Two of the newcomers—antagonistic migrant Hank Spruill and a switchblade-wielding Mexican known only as Cowboy—are trouble from the start, but the Chandlers' dire financial straits put the need for a quick and profitable harvest above all other concerns. Luke, who spies and eavesdrops to relieve his boredom (and to circumvent parental mores that mandate his removal from any "adult" business), is usually on hand wherever the action is thickest. In short order, he witnesses Spruill killing a local troublemaker, Cowboy showing a scandalous romantic interest in Spruill's pretty sister Tally, and a variety of other local social crises, including the birth of an illegitimate baby on a nearby sharecropper's farm. Grisham lays out his coming-of-age novel in clear, spare, arid terms, using his usual conceptual and textual simplicity to convey the austerity of a life where radio broadcasts of baseball games, gossip about the neighbors, and the weekly trip into town are the primary entertainments. The result is involving and readable, though Grisham's usual fans will likely feel understimulated by the even pacing and the small scale of both the setting and the action. But they can take comfort from the familiarity of his characters, who are, as ever, unreconstructed stereotypes. Luke and his underdeveloped family are little more than aspects of their environments; the unpredictable and all-important Arkansas weather is a far more dynamic character than any of them. As a result, A Painted House is more of a bland landscape than a human portrait. But it's still a relatively bold artistic statement for an artist working in sepia tones after years of gaudy neon.