Review: The Case for John Grisham
John Grisham is a national treasure, indeed a global one. I suppose it’s necessary to lead with that assertion, because snobs have turned his name into a byword for tacky, worthless airport fiction. If I could do what Grisham does, I would do it in a heartbeat – and I would have a lot more money than I do. I think he’s a wonderful writer and, by all accounts, a fine and admirable human being.
Grisham is an authentic Southerner whose novels are at once thoroughly contemporary and steeped in a sense of history that has become both subtler and darker over the two decades of his career. Read together (and I’ve read them all, except his recent young-adult novels Theodore Boone, Kid Lawyer and Theodore Boone: The Abduction), they constitute an enjoyable and edifying fictionalized history of our era, and not a flattering one. Grisham’s bailiwick is the southern part of Middle America, with forays when he feels like it into exotic locales like Brazil (The Partner, The Testament) and Italy (The Broker, Playing for Pizza). It’s true that some – by no means all – of his novels have been formulaic, but people who make that complaint are really just the aforementioned snobs, looking for a cheap excuse to dismiss Grisham and his millions of avid readers entirely.
Grisham wrote his first novel, A Time to Kill, for the best of reasons: because he wanted to, and because his wife encouraged him. When his second novel, The Firm, became a surprise hit, he was intelligent enough to jump on the runaway gravy train and make the most of it.
By that I mean not only seeking money and fame, but gratefully accepting those rare byproducts of writerly success and deploying them to useful effect. Grisham has done this in side projects like serving as publisher of the literary magazine The Oxford American and on the board of The Innocence Project, but above all he’s done it by first mastering, then twisting and stretching, the thriller formula to reflect his own concerns and interests, and at times by offering books that aren’t thrillers at all but that trade on his fame to cajole readers into joining him outside the box. Skipping Christmas and Bleachers and Playing for Pizza are delightful and not-unserious trifles; The Innocent Man packs a wallop because it’s nonfiction that reads like a John Grisham novel; the recent short story collection Ford County is wonderful; A Painted House is an exquisitely composed and lovingly rendered masterpiece depicting a quite specific time and place with honest and clear-eyed nostalgia.
Of his thrillers proper, the best are the ones that do more than just thrill, by giving rein to Grisham’s assumed role as an American storyteller and social moralist, a Steinbeck for our times. Still his best thriller of all is the very first, A Time to Kill, which poses the gut-wrenchingly hard question What would you do? The Chamber makes you stop and think about the death penalty, regardless of which view you held before you read it. The Testament combines a beautifully rendered appreciation of the Amazon with an admiring account of a life lived well, i.e. for others and the greater good. The Last Juror is one of my favorites, partly because its hero is not a lawyer but a gutsy local newspaper publisher. The Appeal challenges us in a different way, by veering jarringly away from the comfort zone of expected vindication for plucky underdogs.
Which brings me to The Confession, Grisham’s latest. I wouldn’t dream of ruining the story for you, but suffice it to say that it’s one of his most satisfying thrillers, not only because of the seriousness of its moral and social concerns, but also because of the very intentional way that Grisham constructs the story to subvert our expectation of a happy ending. He gives us what we paid for – a page-turner – but he lets neither the individual reader nor American society off the hook. His moral sensibility has become darker and harder-edged in recent books, and this is even more evident in The Confession than it was a couple of years ago in The Appeal. This trend is a testament to his underlying, basic seriousness and integrity.
John Grisham has enormous stamina – 25 mostly excellent books in just over 20 years – and obvious wide appeal (hundreds of millions of copies sold). These aren’t the most interesting things about him, though. More interesting is that he’s onto something; he shows American society things it needs to see about itself, in stories that are at once palatable and unsparing. And he makes me proud to be an American because, both in his books themselves and in the way he carries himself through his life and career, he shows that there might remain some little hope for America. Any society that, amid all the rogues and mediocrities and egomaniacs, can produce a John Grisham once in a while must have some redeeming qualities after all.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). His account of his February-March 2011 trip to Pakistan, titled “After the Flood,” will be published as a stand-alone electronic book and as a chapter added to the next printing of Overtaken By Events. He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime in Haiti. Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
Osama article, college visits, TEDx: Ethan Casey newsletter
Dear friends and fans of Ethan Casey,
Thank you for your support, and welcome to the first installment of a new regular newsletter you can expect to receive roughly every two weeks.
Join the Ethan Casey page on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
Recent Events:
At the tail end of a ten-day trip during which he spoke at Harvard, MIT, Cornell and the inaugural fundraiser for the Dallas chapter of The Citizens Foundation, Ethan was in Fort Worth meeting with contacts at Texas Christian University when he heard the news of Osama bin Laden’s death. He stayed up all night writing an article for the Pakistani newspaper Dawn. We have republished the article on Ethan’s website, with permission:
“Capturing Osama: The urgent importance of mutual respect”
http://www.ethancasey.com/2011/05/capturing-osama-the-urgent-importance-of-mutual-respect/
(Ethan will be writing a weekly column for Dawn starting next week, by the way.)
During the following week, Ethan was interviewed by the BBC and by KING 5, a Seattle TV station. The KING 5 interview is two and a half minutes long and does a nice job concisely encapsulating Ethan’s views:
“Bin Laden raid could make U.S.-Pakistan relationship tougher”
http://www.king5.com/video?id=121217089&sec=549122
Before bin Laden, there was the controversy spurred by the 60 Minutes coverage of Greg Mortenson. If you haven’t already read Ethan’s article on that, which was read widely and republished on the Huffington Post, you can read it here. Ethan challenges us all to look beneath the surface of the media hype and examine the deeper issues:
“Greg Mortenson Redefines ‘Doing One’s Best’”
http://www.ethancasey.com/2011/04/greg-mortenson-redefines-doing-ones-best/
Ethan has also begun publishing book reviews on his website, most recently this appreciation of Tony Judt who, as Ethan puts it, “was a rare specimen, an endangered species: an intellectual who refused to let his facility with language or pleasure at hearing his own voice overwhelm his honesty and integrity.” Read the review here:
“Review: Reappraising recent and current history”
http://www.ethancasey.com/2011/05/review-reappraising-recent-and-current-history/
Coming Events:
Ethan is home in Seattle at the moment but will be hitting the road again soon. In the coming weeks Ethan will be visiting Chicago, New Jersey, and Baltimore. At the University of Chicago, he will be speaking at and judging a competition of 40 young social entrepreneurs called RISE Pakistan. On June 1, Ethan will be giving a TEDx talk at the Princeton Library.
Thank you all for all the support you show by reading, commenting on, and sharing Ethan’s work. With all the attention Pakistan has been getting lately, Ethan’s work and your support are more important than ever.
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Best regards,
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ben Owen
Assistant to Ethan Casey,
author of Alive and Well in Pakistan
P.O. Box 85315
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Capturing Osama: The urgent importance of mutual respect
I wrote the following article overnight on May 1-2 for the Pakistani daily newspaper Dawn. It’s republished here with permission.
FORT WORTH – As I begin writing this it’s 2 am where I am and 3 am in New York and Washington, where exuberant crowds have gathered at Ground Zero and the White House, belligerently chanting “USA! USA!” and singing the national anthem and an ugly country-western song called “God Bless the USA.” By the time you read this, you surely will have seen and heard some of that on television. It bodes ill.
The fact that Osama bin Laden was killed well inside Pakistan, by US Navy SEALs, is dangerously embarrassing to the Pakistani state and military. “He was right under the noses of the Pakistani military there,” said Fox News correspondent Jennifer Griffin, who noted that Abbottabad is a “well-known military town.” Lt-Gen Thomas McInerney, also on Fox, was even more ominously to the point: “We’ve got enough problems with Pakistan that if we had talked to anybody in that government, Osama would have gotten away. We have a problem with Pakistan. Everybody’s talking about it. This will highlight it.”
Equally worrying is the attitude Americans are expressing toward the US military. It’s one thing to be respectful, another to be worshipful, and Americans seem frighteningly oblivious to the cost to our society of its reverence toward the youngsters glibly known here as “our men and women in uniform.” Debra Burlingame, sister of the pilot whose plane hit the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, said: “Thanks again to our wonderful military; a big hats-off to the CIA.” A US Marine in uniform told the buffoonish Fox correspondent Geraldo Rivera, “I know for the military, we’re motivated as hell right now.” A Republican former Congressman called the US military “the most important profession that anyone can be in” and said, “I think that this is one for the team.”
That phrase calls to mind the in-your-face symbolism of American football as a metaphor for war, and Noam Chomsky’s apt description of sports as “training in irrational jingoism.” Rivera gushed about the “patriotism worn on their sleeves” of the shockingly young crowd hooting it up outside the White House, but it’s more than ever important to reclaim that word from the right wing and to highlight the distinction that George Orwell insisted on way back in 1945: “Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. … Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power.”
By Orwell’s definition, I’m happy to call myself a patriotic American. And such a sentiment is consistent with the Holy Quran: “O mankind! We have created you from a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that you may know one another.” Patriotism implies respect for others who are differently patriotic, and that should be fine with everyone. But the young Americans that Geraldo Rivera is celebrating, the children of 9/11, have spent the past decade being trained in irrational jingoism and are blithely unaware of the impression our country has left on the rest of the world. I recall something a thoughtful American friend said to me in Haiti in 2004, a year when that country was more than usually brutalized by American power: “When you see other people waving their countries’ flags you think, ‘That’s nice, they love their country.’ When you see the American flag, you know people are going to die.”
“Too many people still believe in the state, and war is the health of the state,” wrote Ernest Hemingway in 1934. Sixty-four years after its founding, and for explicable reasons, Pakistan is still in state-building mode, and the military is an effective and patriotic national institution. I visited Swat in March, and since then I’ve been praising what I perceive as its restraint and benevolence there to audiences around the US. But the fact that bin Laden was killed, by US forces, just down the road from a Pakistani military school in Abbottabad is a severe black eye to the Pakistani state. Pakistani citizens and media will be doing their country a patriotic service if, far from excusing it, they continue to hold the state’s feet to the fire for what clearly was either its incompetence or its complicity with bin Laden. Such assertion of Pakistani society’s independence from the Pakistani state will count for a lot in coming days and weeks as friends of Pakistan like myself, and others of goodwill, do our best to resist another surge of militaristic American nationalism.
As I watch over and over the mobs in New York and Washington, I fear two things. One is that too many Pakistanis are too traumatised to lay aside their anger and frustration. “WE HATE AMERICANS!!!” a Pakistani I don’t know personally told me on Facebook, just as I was finishing this piece. When I pointed out that I’m American and asked if he hated me, he replied, “I hate all of u!!”
The other thing I fear is that too few Americans appreciate the difference between global war and a giant football game. Football players have no more individuality than cogs in a machine, and the role of the crowd in a football stadium is to channel the emotions of vindictive triumphalism and hatred. That’s what I’m seeing on US television as I write this. The legendary populist politician Huey Long is reputed to have said, prophetically, “When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the American flag.” Or, as CNN quoted someone as asking pithily if pathetically on Twitter, “If Osama bin Laden is dead, can we please have our rights back?”
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). His account of his February-March 2011 trip to Pakistan, titled “After the Flood,” will be published as a stand-alone electronic book and as a chapter added to the next printing of Overtaken By Events. He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime in Haiti, to be published in fall 2011, and collaborating with filmmaker Naeem Randhawa on a collection of stories by and about Muslims living in America. Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
Review: Reappraising recent and current history
I recently finished reading Reappraisals, a collection of Judt’s book reviews and essays published in 2008. It had been a while since reading any book was a truly bracing experience for me. Subtitled “Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century,” it fills in what, in retrospect after having read it, one realizes were inexcusable gaps in one’s own education and thinking. Ranging from once familiar but receding figures like Arthur Koestler, Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt and Albert Camus, to a merciless demolition of the French leftist poseur Louis Althusser, to “Eric Hobsbawm and the Romance of Communism,” Pope John Paul II and Edward Said, Judt is at home in the company of the 20th century’s greatest and most engaged minds. A section titled “Lost in Transition” is devastating on the abuse of history and memory in Europe, particularly France and Britain (he calls Tony Blair “the gnome in England’s Garden of Forgetting”) and includes a fascinating essay called “The Stateless State: Why Belgium Matters.”
The book also includes several essays on America, on Israel, and on their mutually destructive symbiosis. As a formerly true-believing Zionist and kibbutznik, Judt has a particular authority to contrast the admittedly imperfect and self-deluding pre-1967 Israel that he remembers with what it became after what he calls the “dark victory” of the Six-Day War. “The Country That Wouldn’t Grow Up,” an essay he contributed in 2006 to Ha’aretz – a Jew addressing fellow Jews – includes this doe of reality, from a classroom encounter at New York University:
I cannot think, I told the students, of any country that occupies such a pejorative space in democratic public consciousness today [as Franco's Spain used to do]. You are wrong, one young woman replied: What about Israel? To my great surprise most of the class (including many of the sizable Jewish contingent) nodded their approval. The times they are indeed a-changing.
In “The Silence of the Lambs: On the Strange Death of Liberal America,” Judt heaps well-earned scorn on “liberal hawks” who dishonored themselves as cheerleaders for Bush’s war in Iraq:
But like Christopher Hitchens and other erstwhile left-liberal pundits now expert in “Islamo-Fascism,” [Peter] Beinart and [Paul] Berman and their ilk really are familiar – and comfortable – with a binary division of the world along ideological lines. A world thus divided is familiar to them from their parents’ time; in some cases they can even look back to their own youthful Trotskyism, when seeking a template and thesaurus for world-historical antagonisms. In order today’s “fight” (note the recycled Leninist lexicon of conflicts, clashes, struggles, and wars) to make political sense, it too must have a single universal foe whose ideas we can study, theorize, and combat; and the new confrontation must be reducible, just like its twentieth-century predecessor, to a familiar juxtaposition that eliminates exotic complexity and confusion: Democracy vs. Totalitarianism, Freedom vs. Fascism, Them vs. Us.
Judt thus identifies an intellectual wellspring of the perilous toxin of anti-Muslim bigotry that currently pervades American society, across the ideological spectrum. If it’s true, as I content, that Muslims are the only group against whom it’s considered not only acceptable but somehow even admirable to be bigoted in today’s America, then Bush’s liberal toadies bear a large measure of the blame. “Today, America’s liberal armchair warriors are the “useful idiots” of the War on Terror,” writes Judt. And he dismisses in grand fashion the most useful idiot of all: “To be sure [Thomas] Friedman’s portentous, Pulitzer-winning pieties are always carefully road tested for middle-brow acceptability. But for just that reason they are a sure guide to the mood of the American intellectual mainstream.” And he arrives at a disturbing conclusion:
They are, as it might be, the canaries in the sulfurous mine shaft of modern democracy. And thus the alacrity with which many of America’s most prominent liberals have censored themselves in the name of the “war on terror,” the enthusiasm with which they have invented ideological and moral cover for war and war crimes and proferred that cover to their political enemies: All this is a bad sign. Liberal intellectuals used to be distinguished precisely by their efforts to think for themselves, rather than in the service of others. Intellectuals should not be smugly theorizing endless war, much less confidently promoting and excusing it.
Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). His account of his February-March 2011 trip to Pakistan, titled “After the Flood,” will be published as a stand-alone electronic book and as a chapter added to the next printing of Overtaken By Events. He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime in Haiti, to be published in fall 2011, and collaborating with filmmaker Naeem Randhawa on a collection of stories by and about Muslims living in America. Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
