Calico Joe by John Grisham

Pigeon holes are made for pigeons.  John Grisham is trying to get away from his type-casting as a legal thriller author.  This book is not going to free him from his pigeon hole.

“Calico Joe” is a cute book.  Thankfully it is short.  I never was able to “suspend my disbelief.”  John Grisham is a good author; he does a great job portraying people in his legal mileau.  Sports is not his thing.  The plotline was irritating and almost childishly contrived.  The research work to add in names, dates, and statistics was superficial and seemed wedged in every so often separate from the story.  Even the supposed time-frame, 1973, forty years ago feels contrived to appeal to a male 45-65 year-old market segment.  I was left with the feeling that had the release date been six months earlier or later, this could just as easily been a football book.

The book is a baseball fairytale with good triumphing over evil, but with no moral at the end.  Calico Joe is 100% good: Warren Tracy has evil in him.  The narrator relates the tale of each man and their eventual meeting as batter and pitcher on a baseball diamond.  Evil wins that day,but both men are destroyed as a result of their encounter … .. until Tracy’s son comes along thirty years later and heals both men, who wind up smiling and shaking hands. 

Most sports writers deal with real events, sometimes embellished through a writer’s license to heigthen drama and comedy, romance and sports passion.  As a reader, it’s passion that I look for in sports stories, even the fictional ones.  “The Legend of Bagger Vance” comes to mind as an ideal golf story.  Set in time far back enough that portrayals of the famous names doesn’t irritate anyone and the fictional lead characters were believable, all magic being incorporated into a fictionally acceptable “Bagger.” 

With more than a century of baseball history to use as a backdrop for a novel, why create a new Babe Ruth or Ted Williams.  Of course my answer to that question is money: for film rights.  All the real famous players have either been “done” many times, and/or doing them again would mean sharing control and profits with others.  “Calico Joe” is 100% Grisham’s.  This slim book reads just like a film script.  When this movie is made, there will be no grandson, nor other heirs to squabble over the memory of their father.

I can think of no other reason for writing this book other than milking another, distinctly different demographic for the movie.  I didn’t learn anything from this book.  I didn’t develop any sympathy for any of the characters, good or evil.  I couldn’t help but dislike Warren Tracy because he was portrayed as an evil, mean bully.  There was no “take-away” from having read this book.  It was like the cliché about hours after eating Chinese food; done, but with an empty feeling.  I should have waited for the movie.