45 pages • 1 hour read
John GrishamA Painted House
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 29-36Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 29 Summary
Stick finds the missing vehicle at a bus station in a nearby city; Tally and Cowboy refilled the tank. He learns from the bus station attendant that the pair got on a bus to Chicago; Tally left a note for her father explaining that she’s planning to marry Cowboy up north. With the rains continuing and both Hank and Tally gone, the Spruills decide to leave. Trot gives Luke the paint and brushes he’s been using to paint the house, and Luke, much to his mother’s excitement, decides to finish what Trot started.
Chapter 30 Summary
The Chandlers and the Mexican workers continue to pick cotton as the weather permits, but the storms steadily increase in severity. Luke goes into town with his parents; while they make a phone call, he eats ice cream. Jackie Moon and Pearl ask Luke if his parents are planning to head north for work, but Luke doesn’t know. When his parents finish the call, they buy more paint so Luke can continue his work.
Chapter 31 Summary
Luke quickly discovers that painting a house is hard work. The Mexican workers offer to help him, and with their labor, he soon uses all the paint his parents bought, which covers only the rear of the house. After he finishes, Pappy takes him down to the river, and they find that it’s flooding.
Later, Luke’s mother tells him that she and his father are planning to move the family north to Flint, Michigan, where she and his father will work for the same automobile manufacturer that employs Jimmy Dale. Luke is to keep this move secret.
Chapter 32 Summary
The rains continue, and the flood water fills the fields and approaches the house, making picking difficult. Luke and his father head into town for more paint. Luke’s father doesn’t have enough money for the paint, so Luke uses some of his own picking money to buy more. While they’re in town, the postman gives Luke a letter from Ricky telling the family that he’ll be home by Christmas.
Chapter 33 Summary
Because the fields can’t be harvested, the Mexican workers pack up to leave. Before they go, though, Luke enlists their help one last time in painting the house, and they finish all but the front of the house. Pappy and Luke’s father drive the Mexican workers into town, and Luke helps his mother with the garden. They discuss how moving north will allow the family to depend on work other than farming for income and that Luke will get to go to school up north. Luke’s mother tells him that she’s pregnant, and Luke, in return, tells her about spying on Libby’s delivery.
Chapter 34 Summary
A few days later, a mud-covered Mr. Latcher comes to the house and tells Pappy that their house has been flooded and they need help getting out. Gran offers to let the Latchers stay in their barn, and Luke’s father leaves to borrow a boat from a neighbor because transporting the Latchers to the Chandler residence via the river will be easier than by land. While they wait for him to return, Luke privately tells Pappy about witnessing Hank’s murder; Pappy tells him to keep it secret.
Luke’s father returns with the boat, and they go to the Latchers’ home and rescue everyone inside by boat. The Chandlers return to their house with the Latchers and give them food and dry clothing. Libby’s newborn has colic, so Luke goes with his parents into town to buy the infant ice cream, which they believe helps with colic. While in town, Luke buys more paint.
Chapter 35 Summary
While the adult Chandlers discuss their financial issues—which have been compounded by the arrival of the Latchers—Luke talks to Libby about Ricky. Libby expresses her fondness for Ricky and says that they plan to be married when he gets back from Korea. With Mr. Latcher’s help, Luke uses up the paint he bought working on the front of the house. Luke’s mother reveals that they’re going to head north by bus the next day; Pappy and Gran, though upset that their family is leaving, understand the financial imperative of this change.
Chapter 36 Summary
The next day, Pappy drives Luke and his parents into town. He promises Luke that he’ll finish the small bit of the house that is still unpainted before Luke gets back. Luke’s father buys tickets to St. Louis. Luke is excited since it’s the home of his favorite baseball team. As the family heads toward the first stop on their long journey to Flint, Luke sees his mother smiling.
Chapters 29-36 Analysis
The floodwaters finally arrive, and, in Chapter 34, the Chandlers find themselves rescuing the Latchers from their flooded home. Luke’s father gets his hands on a boat, and they maneuver it through the floodwaters: “The adults paddled as we moved along the narrow road, two feet above the ground, rows of ruined cotton passing by” (364). The imagery here takes on decidedly biblical overtones, with the flood and ruined crops recalling Noah and the Ark, when God flooded the earth as punishment for human wickedness and corruption. The biblical allusions heighten the tension of these closing chapters by connecting the Chandlers to the mythos of their faith tradition. The rescue of the Latchers, already a tense endeavor, takes on the quality of an epic through these allusions. The biblical overtones can also be understood as a function of Luke’s narration. Luke has been raised in a firmly Baptist tradition, with the narrative repeatedly underscoring how often and for how long he attends church services. The overtones in this section contextualize his viewpoint as the child of Southern Baptists and show the reader the lens he uses to understand the events of the narrative.
This closing section of the novel sees Kathleen Chandler finally achieving one of her primary goals: getting herself, her son, and her husband out of Black Oak and into a community that doesn’t depend on farming. Luke is initially torn about his parents’ decision to leave. Happy that his mother will finally get what she’s worked for, he still demurs, “the thought of leaving the only place I’d ever lived was unsettling. And I couldn’t imagine life without Pappy and Gran” (335). These final chapters force Luke to begin the work of imagining a new life. Luke discovers, as he’s driven to the bus station by Pappy after saying goodbye to Gran, that the work of imagining new futures requires him to leave behind people who have so far defined his life. Who will he be without his dependence on his grandparents or without a life defined by the crop cycles of cotton? The excitement that marks the novel’s closing pages suggests that Luke, despite his fears, looks forward to finding the answers to these questions.
Though A Painted House resolves many of the narrative’s driving tensions by the end, it leaves one significant question unresolved. Throughout the novel, the family worries about what will happen to Ricky. The prospect of Ricky’s death in Korea, though never explicitly verbalized by Luke, haunts the family. The intense focus on Ricky’s well-being, coupled with the subplot in which Luke writes to Ricky telling him about his and Libby’s baby, creates the narrative expectation of a resolution to whether Ricky survives the war, comes home by Christmas, and meets his child. Grisham doesn’t provide this closure, though; the novel ends with Luke realizing that he won’t be in Black Oak if/when Ricky returns home. The lack of closure about this question creates a sense of dissatisfaction and unease. Luke either will grow up with his beloved uncle living in a different state or grow up without his uncle entirely. This unease mirrors the Chandlers’ feelings in the novel’s final pages and, indeed, what they’ve felt throughout the narrative. Grisham’s choice to leave this plot thread unresolved leaves the reader in the same emotional space as the characters as the narrative closes.
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