Review: The Case for John Grisham
Posted by Ethan Casey on May 15, 2011 · 2 Comments
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
Right you are about John Grisham. I’ve met him three times, the first being at the Mississippi Writer’s Conference in 1990 or so. Ford County: Stories and The Confession are two of his newer works, and certainly among his best. Another thing I dig about John is he’s a very principled man–dare we say, a moral man without being moralistic, preachy, or pollyannish. Your premise is right: America and the reading world could certainly use more of John Grisham.
PS: Reading The Confession, which I first heard on NPR, caused me to reconsider my prior approval of capital punishment.