Calico Joe

Calico Joe is one of John Grisham’s non legal novels, published in 2012 and aimed at readers who have followed him outside of the courtroom thrillers that built his career. The book is short by Grisham standards, just under two hundred pages, and it is the kind of project a writer does when he wants to tell a story he has been carrying around for a long time without worrying about whether it will hit the same bestseller numbers as A Time to Kill or The Firm.

The story alternates between two timelines. In 1973, eleven year old Paul Tracey watches his father, Warren Tracey, a journeyman pitcher for the New York Mets, beanball Joe Castle, the rookie phenom from Calico Rock, Arkansas. Joe has been the talk of baseball for weeks, ripping pitches out of the park at a record pace. The pitch ends his career and changes both families’ lives in ways that take decades to play out. In the present day, Paul, now an adult dealing with his estranged father’s terminal cancer, decides to track down what is left of Joe Castle and try to bring the two men together for some kind of reckoning before his father dies.

Grisham clearly knows and loves baseball, and the period detail of the early seventies major leagues is rendered with affection. The pitch by pitch description of the at bat that ends Joe’s career is one of the most painful sequences he has ever written. The novel is less interested in suspense than his thrillers and more interested in the quiet damage that bad fathers do, the kind that takes a lifetime to even begin to undo.

For Grisham fans who want to see his range, or for baseball fans who want a literary novel about the game, Calico Joe is worth a few evenings.