Grisham's Homily
It has never been hard to
understand the appeal of Stephen King. His is the fiction of the American
subconscious: id-lit. Tom Clancy is just as easy. He stands at the vital
intersection of military documentary and Popular
Mechanics . Only
John Grisham, the third in the troika of leading airport-bookstore brand names,
remains mysterious. What does he represent? Nominally, his genre is legal
fiction. But true legal fiction--the work of, say, Scott Turow--organizes
itself around the courtroom, and Grisham's courtroom scenes are lackluster. He
seems more comfortable with the before and after--with the back and forth of
white-shoe lawyers who never leave the office--than with showdowns for the
judge and jury. Had Grisham written The Caine Mutiny , Capt. Queeg would
have settled.
Nor is
Grisham particularly good at the kinds of things you expect from a decent
thriller writer. Compared to, say, David Baldacci ( Absolute Power ) or
Joseph Finder ( The
Zero Hour ), his plotting is pedestrian. When
it comes to character, he can do hard-working, naive, up-from-the-middle-class
associates in their late 20s. He can do brilliant, crusty octogenarian senior
partners. And he can do public-interest lawyers with Jewish last names. But
that's about it. Grisham's protagonists tend to be more memorable in the movie
versions of his novels than in the novels themselves, which is remarkable
considering that the movie versions aren't terribly memorable to begin
with.
So why is Grisham so successful? The answer, I think, is
that his books proceed from a perspective radically different from that of his
competitors. Most legal fiction begins with the criminal and derives the law:
It's what enters at the end, deus ex machina like, to separate the heroes
from the villains. Grisham, by contrast, begins with the law and derives the
criminal. In Grisham's universe, it is not the felonious mind that shapes the
legal world. It is the legal world and its attendant institutions that shape
the felonious mind. (Of course, lots of other people see the world this way
too. It's just that they tend to be political-science professors, not thriller
writers.)
Grisham's
achievement is to use this inverted narrative to create a sense of purpose in
his novels--to make them seem consequential. The Chamber , for instance,
was a wonderful novel. But it was also an incisive and brilliant argument
against the death penalty. The Runaway Jury , Grisham's penultimate book,
was an intelligent and compelling indictment of the tobacco industry that,
because it was sold in the fiction aisle, probably reached a thousand times
more people than every other tobacco-industry indictment combined. To reread
Grisham--in particular, recent Grisham--is to be struck by how completely he is
devoting his celebrity to the articulation of a passionate and decidedly
unfashionable liberalism. This has never been more true, though, than in
Grisham's new book. In The Street Lawyer , Grisham sheds whatever
lingering attachments he may have had to the frivolity of his genre and emerges
as a moralist--a skilled and worthy practitioner of the largely forgotten art
of socially redeeming fiction.
The Street Lawyer is the tale, in the first
person, of Michael Brock, a young, naive, up-from-the-middle-class associate at
a large, faceless corporate law firm in Washington, D.C. Brock is on track to
make partner when a homeless man carrying a gun takes him hostage in the firm's
plush conference room. He escapes, but the incident jars him. He begins a
period of soul-searching. He quits his job. He leaves his cold careerist wife.
He moves out of tony Georgetown and into an apartment in the bad part of town.
He joins a tiny public-interest group representing the poor and downtrodden. He
begins to investigate why the homeless man was so angry at Brock's former law
firm and uncovers--as have many Grisham protagonists before him--a dirty little
secret that his firm has tried to cover up.
The book
has a lean, linear feel to it. Things happen to Brock, and he does not stop to
ask why. He becomes involved with a woman, a fellow activist, but she appears
only fleetingly. ("She lifted the blanket and tucked herself next to me,"
Grisham writes, in the book's sole romantic moment: "I held her firmly; if not
she would've fallen onto the porch. She was easy to hold.") The moment when
Brock decides to leave his high-paying job to help the poor comes as he sits at
his desk comparing himself to Mordecai Green, the public-interest lawyer whose
legal clinic he is about to join. This may be the most abbreviated epiphany in
modern literature:
I helped my clients
swallow up competitors so they could add more zeros to the bottom line, and for
this I would become rich. He helped his clients eat and find a warm bed.
I looked at the
scratchings on my legal pad--the earnings and the years and the path to
wealth--and I was saddened by them. Such blatant and unashamed greed.
The
phone startled me.
Grisham, it is clear, wants nothing to stand in the way of
his central point--that a man who surrenders all his worldly possessions to
defend the homeless is a hero. To have Brock agonize, to have him spend the
bulk of the book desperately weighing the pros and cons of his decision, would
be to have him act as people normally act in novels. And The Street
Lawyer isn't a novel, exactly. It's a homily.
It is hard
to understand how Grisham pulls this off. His books aren't being sold
exclusively to residents of Manhattan's Upper West Side. He is preaching to the
kinds of middle Americans that liberal activists long ago gave up for dead. But
he manages to present politically unpalatable ideas with grace and
understatement. The Street Lawyer avoids the kind of self-righteousness
that usually accompanies homeless activism. Grisham is content with the simple
and compelling observation that as a society we fail to treat the homeless with
the dignity they deserve.
At one point, early in the book, an entire
family of five whom Brock had befriended dies on a bitter winter night, after
being turfed out of their apartment. He visits their bodies in the morgue,
pulling back the sheet: "I closed my eyes," Brock says, "and said a short
prayer, one of mercy and forgiveness. Don't let it happen again, the Lord said
to me." That moment--that prayer--sounds like a cliché. But a cliché is
something said over and over again. And these are things that, in this day and
age, are rarely said at all.
