2011: The Litigators by John Grisham

The Author:

John Grisham (1955-    ) was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, the son of a construction worker. At the age of twelve, his family moved to Southaven, Mississippi.  He graduated with a B.S. from Mississippi State University in 1979.  He passed the Mississippi Bar exam in 1981, and received his J.D. from the University of Mississippi.  In 1981, he married Renee Jones, with whom he had two children. 

Grisham began a successful law practice in 1981, starting in criminal law, and moving to more lucrative civil law.  In 1984, he was elected to the Mississippi State House of Representatives, a position he held in addition to running his law practice.  A case he witnessed while in the state legislature led him to write his first novel, A Time to Kill (1989).  He had trouble finding an agent and publisher.  He eventually found both, and a limited run of 5,000 copies was printed of his first novel.  In 1990, Grisham resigned from his position on state legislature and retired his practice.  In 1991, Doubleday published his second novel, The Firm.  It was a massive commercial success, as were his third and fourth novels, The Pelican Brief (1992) and The Client (1993).  His fourth book, The Chamber (1994) is the first of eleven novels to become the number one annual bestselling novel in the U.S.

Since 1989, Grisham has published a total of 29 novels, five children's books, and a work of non-fiction.  His family splits its time between homes in Oxford, Mississippi, Charlottesville, Virginia, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  Grisham also serves as a board member on the Innocence Project. 

The Book:

Length: 385 pages
Subject/Genre: Lawyers/Legal 'thriller'

This is it.  The last goddamned one.  Let's get this over with.  The Litigators is about a group of litigators (what a shocker).  You start with two low rent ambulance chasers (cf. The Rainmaker) and a successful up-and-comer at a big firm who quits after finding his job meaningless (cf. The Street Lawyer).  They get themselves involved in a big ol' class action lawsuit (cf. The Rainmaker, The Runaway Jury, The Appeal).  There's some wackiness (cf. The Brethren) and a bunch of misfits being misfits while trying to make a living practicing law (cf. The Brethren, The Rainmaker).  There's a case, there are twists in the case, people keep secrets, some people lose a lot of money, some people make a lot of money (cf. every damned Grisham novel after The Chamber).

This isn't Grisham's worst novel, but it's nothing more than a mixture of his decent novels.  The problem now is that I have pretty much nothing to say about it that isn't itself a repeat of an earlier Grisham review.  I could see it being entertaining if someone hadn't read ten more of these freakin' things in the last several months, but I don't have that luxury.  It is thoroughly, relentlessly, and all and all average.  It is neither remarkably good, nor remarkably bad.  It is exactly what I would expect when someone says 'Grisham novel,' nothing more, nothing less.  Maybe the reason this guy sells so well is that by the time the next book comes out, his readers have forgotten his last one.  (I know I'm being rather harsh, both on Grisham and his readers.  This is just me venting frustration.  Eleven of them, for crying out loud!)

Look, it was okay.  I might have even enjoyed it a bit if it didn't feel like I'd read it ten times already.  It's the type of book that a Grisham fan would like, in that it's perfectly standard fare for Grisham.  If that sounds like something you'd like, then go ahead and read it.  Or read any other Grisham novel for the exact same result.  I don't care.  I'm just glad to be done.

Bestsellers of 2011:

1. The Litigators by John Grisham
2. 11/22/63 by Stephen King
3. The Best of Me by Nicholas Sparks
4. Smokin' Seventeen by Janet Evanovich
5. A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin
6. Explosive Eighteen by Janet Evanovich
7. Kill Alex Cross by James Patterson
8. Micro by Michael Crichton
9. Dead Reckoning by Charlaine Harris
10. Locked On by Tom Clancy and Mark Greaney

Also Published in 2011:

The Round House by Louise Erdrich
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer
The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
Pym by Mat Johnson
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

2008: The Appeal by John Grisham

The Author:

John Grisham (1955-    ) was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, the son of a construction worker. At the age of twelve, his family moved to Southaven, Mississippi.  He graduated with a B.S. from Mississippi State University in 1979.  He passed the Mississippi Bar exam in 1981, and received his J.D. from the University of Mississippi.  In 1981, he married Renee Jones, with whom he had two children. 

Grisham began a successful law practice in 1981, starting in criminal law, and moving to more lucrative civil law.  In 1984, he was elected to the Mississippi State House of Representatives, a position he held in addition to running his law practice.  A case he witnessed while in the state legislature led him to write his first novel, A Time to Kill (1989).  He had trouble finding an agent and publisher.  He eventually found both, and a limited run of 5,000 copies was printed of his first novel.  In 1990, Grisham resigned from his position on state legislature and retired his practice.  In 1991, Doubleday published his second novel, The Firm.  It was a massive commercial success, as were his third and fourth novels, The Pelican Brief (1992) and The Client (1993).  His fourth book, The Chamber (1994) is the first of eleven novels to become the number one annual bestselling novel in the U.S.

Since 1989, Grisham has published a total of 29 novels, five children's books, and a work of non-fiction.  His family splits its time between homes in Oxford, Mississippi, Charlottesville, Virginia, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  Grisham also serves as a board member on the Innocence Project. 

The Book:

Cover design-John Fontana/Illustration-Shasti O'Leary Soudant/
Photograph-Nicholas Giraud

Length: 484 pages
Subject/Genre: Law/Legal Thriller

The Appeal starts with a verdict against a blatantly evil chemical company which had been knowingly dumping toxic waste into the water supply.  The jury finds the company responsible, and, in addition to a few million in actual damages, awards $38 million in punitive damages.  This opens up the company and it's owner, Carl Trudeau, to more lawsuits and possible bankruptcy.  Trudeau realizes this, and knows he might not win an appeal (mostly because he's unbelievably guilty), so he decides to stack the deck in his favor.  Mississippi is one of a few states that elects state supreme court judges, so Trudeau decides to get someone who will side with him on the bench, replacing a justice that generally sides with plaintiffs.  This process takes up most of the book.  I don't generally like giving away endings, but in this case it's necessary.  Fisk gets elected, almost has a change of heart, but ends up sticking with Trudeau, who ends the party having a big big party on a big big boat.

Trudeau is evil to the point of making the issue of judicial elections go past black and white and into comic book territory.  He's a mix of Sherman McCoy from The Bonfire of the Vanities and Lex Luther.  Here's an actual quote from the meeting after he finds out he lost the initial case.  "Not one dime of our hard-earned profits will ever get into the hands of those trailer park peasants."  While I understand the use of setting clear good and evil when writing a novel with a very specific moral (electing judges is a bad idea), you eventually reach a point of diminishing returns.  Either your reader is an idiot, in which case you're screwed no matter how obvious you make your point, or he's not an idiot, in which case you shouldn't treat him as if he needs the obvious shoved in his face. And this isn't just me griping over my tenth Grisham novel.  I've mentioned before that I like to read the Goodreads reviews on the books I read for this project, and reviews for this book generally fell into two camps.  The smaller camp was people complaining about the panderingly oversimplification of the novel's purpose.  The larger camp is mostly comprised of people who start the review declaring their fandom for Grisham, but giving it a one star rating because they didn't like the ending.  To quote user Alicia: "Grisham could have had a great legal thriller but instead he chose to write a political commentary that tricked me into thinking I was reading for pleasure and enjoyment."    

To quote the top review (from user babyhippoface): "I understand what Grisham was trying to do, but I hate what he did. Hate. H-A-T-E. "    

I never thought I'd feel bad for John Grisham.  He usually gives his book happy, or at least happy-ish, endings.  The good guys win and bad guys get theirs, even when it doesn't make sense.  He's often written about the corruption in politics and the legal world, and if the goodreads response to this novel is indicative of his average reader, I can understand why he felt the need to stop giving them happy endings.  Look, I get that people want stories that are entertaining.  There's nothing wrong with entertainment, with enjoyment, with reading for pleasure.  But what level of obliviousness and complacency and entitlement leads to the response this novel received?  The dislike it receives for being hyperbolic or heavy-handed I understand (and agree with).  But it seems like the general reaction was anger, anger at Grisham for not having given them a happy ending tied up in a neat bow.  Their reaction was to go online and write angry comments about Grisham, rather than write angry letters to their congressman.  Grisham usually brings some social issue into his novels, and he usually deals with them in a very superficial manner.  The Appeal is no exception.  But I'm just struck by the aggressive indifference of his fanbase.  It's one thing if they didn't just like the ending, but the general rhetoric is that they were angry at Grisham for not giving them the ending they wanted, that he had wronged them by disturbing their carefully built up complacency.  I guess I'm angry.  That I had to first read nearly five hundred pages of boring, heavy-handed agitprop, and that I now have to get up here and defend it against criticism far more stupid than the novel itself.  It would be one thing if they disagreed with the message of the novel, but they seem to generally agree.  Perhaps a condensed version of the response would be: "I agree that this is bad, but how dare you make me be aware of it."

I know there are still good books that sell a lot of copies, and there are writers who take on serious social and political issues.  But these two categories seem to keep moving farther and farther apart.  Even up to the 1970's you'd find people like Solzhenitsyn on the top ten annual list.  And this is ignoring the days when people like Sinclair Lewis, or Pearl Buck, or John Steinbeck, or Edna Ferber were some of the most read authors in the nation.  Even books I enjoyed, like A Thousand Splendid Suns or the Millenium trilogy, are limited to already popular statements like 'don't blow shit up' or 'sexism is bad.'  I guess I'm just frustrated by a culture that considers entertainment to necessarily be nothing but mindless diversion and wish-fulfillment, and an industry that caters to and encourages this.  

I'm sure you can figure out my recommendation (and probably my general frame of mind as well).

Bestsellers of 2008:

1. The Appeal by John Grisham
2. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski
3. The Host by Stephenie Meyer
4. Cross Country by James Patterson
5. The Lucky One by Nicholas Sparks
6. Fearless Fourteen by Janet Evanovich
7. Christmas Sweater by Glenn Beck
8. Scarpetta by Patricia Cornwell
9. Your Heart Belongs to Me by Dean Koontz
10. Plum Lucky by James Patterson

Also Published in 2008:

2666 by Roberto Bolaño (English translation)
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
A Mercy by Toni Morrison
Home by Marilynn Robinson
When You are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris

2005: The Broker by John Grisham

The Author:

John Grisham (1955-    ) was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, the son of a construction worker. At the age of twelve, his family moved to Southaven, Mississippi.  He graduated with a B.S. from Mississippi State University in 1979.  He passed the Mississippi Bar exam in 1981, and received his J.D. from the University of Mississippi.  In 1981, he married Renee Jones, with whom he had two children. 

Grisham began a successful law practice in 1981, starting in criminal law, and moving to more lucrative civil law.  In 1984, he was elected to the Mississippi State House of Representatives, a position he held in addition to running his law practice.  A case he witnessed while in the state legislature led him to write his first novel, A Time to Kill (1989).  He had trouble finding an agent and publisher.  He eventually found both, and a limited run of 5,000 copies was printed of his first novel.  In 1990, Grisham resigned from his position on state legislature and retired his practice.  In 1991, Doubleday published his second novel, The Firm.  It was a massive commercial success, as were his third and fourth novels, The Pelican Brief (1992) and The Client (1993).  His fourth book, The Chamber (1994) is the first of eleven novels to become the number one annual bestselling novel in the U.S.

Since 1989, Grisham has published a total of 29 novels, five children's books, and a work of non-fiction.  His family splits its time between homes in Oxford, Mississippi, Charlottesville, Virginia, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  Grisham also serves as a board member on the Innocence Project. 

The Book:

Length: 
Subject/Genre: espionage/legal 'thriller

The Broker begins with the outgoing president doling out last minute pardons when the CIA director shows up insisting he pardon Joel Backman, a high powered DC attorney and power broker in prison for conspiring to sell access to a cutting edge satellite system.  No one knows who the system belongs to, so the CIA director's plan is to use Backman as bait.  Whoever's system he has the keys to will want him dead.  This is point, only a couple dozen pages in, where the novel stops making sense.  Backman is smuggled out of the country, first to a military hospital in Italy.  That the CIA planned to 'interrogate' him there is made abundantly clear, but he won't let them give him any medication, nor will he eat or drink anything they give him for fear he'll be drugged.  To clarify, the CIA is willing to ship him halfway across the world and plan to have others kill him, but they ditch their plans to torture him because he won't willingly ingest any drugged food.  The CIA murder a former white house official in the middle of London to keep Backman's location secret, but they are unwilling to even touch a hair on Backman's head.

Backman is sent to a small city in Italy, and later Milan, where he is told he is given a fake identity.  He's told that he's being relocated and is given an intensive language course and taught local customs, ostensibly so he can live off the grid for the rest of his life.  All of which is at direct cross-purposes to the CIA's plans.  There's absolutely no benefit to teaching him any of this, except that it allows him to escape their grasp.  There's passage after passage about Milanese art, culture, geography, history, food, etc. etc., none of which Backman needs to know if the plan is to leak his location to any foreign governments who'd want him dead. My assumption is that somewhere in Grisham's tax returns is a month long Italian vacation written off as a work expense.

While I was a bit bored by most of his early novels, they at least had internal logic.  The characters and organizations had reasons to do what they did, reasons that made sense rather than just providing the opportunity for something else to happen later.  I spent the whole novel wondering why the CIA did any of the things they did, which would have been tolerable if Backman had at least been interesting.  But he's just a stock character, the same late-middle-age high-price high-power workaholic attorney that we see in nearly every Grisham novel.  String of divorces? Check.  Estranged children? Check.  History of avarice and ostentation that he now regrets? Check.  He's a boring character in an unnecessary situation.

I'm not sure who this book is aimed at.  If you like legal thrillers, it's not for you, and if you like espionage thrillers, this is a poor example.  I could only recommend this to Grisham completists.

Bestsellers of 2005:

1. The Broker by John Grisham
2. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
3. Mary, Mary by James Patterson
4. At First Sight by Nicholas Sparks
5. Predator by Patricia Cornwell
6. True Believer by Nicholas Sparks
7. Light from Heaven by Jan Karon
8. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
9. The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd
10. Eleven on Top by Janet Evanovich


Also Published in 2005:

The Sea by John Banville
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian by Marina Lewycka
Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

1999: The Testament by John Grisham

The Author:

John Grisham (1955-    ) was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, the son of a construction worker. At the age of twelve, his family moved to Southaven, Mississippi.  He graduated with a B.S. from Mississippi State University in 1979.  He passed the Mississippi Bar exam in 1981, and received his J.D. from the University of Mississippi.  In 1981, he married Renee Jones, with whom he had two children. 

Grisham began a successful law practice in 1981, starting in criminal law, and moving to more lucrative civil law.  In 1984, he was elected to the Mississippi State House of Representatives, a position he held in addition to running his law practice.  A case he witnessed while in the state legislature led him to write his first novel, A Time to Kill (1989).  He had trouble finding an agent and publisher.  He eventually found both, and a limited run of 5,000 copies was printed of his first novel.  In 1990, Grisham resigned from his position on state legislature and retired his practice.  In 1991, Doubleday published his second novel, The Firm.  It was a massive commercial success, as were his third and fourth novels, The Pelican Brief (1992) and The Client (1993).  His fourth book, The Chamber (1994) is the first of eleven novels to become the number one annual bestselling novel in the U.S.

Since 1989, Grisham has published a total of 29 novels, five children's books, and a work of non-fiction.  His family splits its time between homes in Oxford, Mississippi, Charlottesville, Virginia, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  Grisham also serves as a board member on the Innocence Project.  

The Book:

Length: 435 pages

Subject/Genre: Last Wills and Testaments/Legal Thriller

The Testament is the most boring of the Grisham novels so far.  The story begins in the first person, with elderly billionaire Troy Phelan preparing his last will and testament.  The details are mildly interesting, but suffice it to say that he convinces his relatives (who he hates) that they'll be getting everything.  He arranges the situation so he'll be declared sane by some of the best expert witnesses around, before jumping from the top floor of his skyscraper.  Phelan's family and lawyer are surprised to discover that he has left everything to Rachel Lane, an illegitimate daughter no one knew about.  To make matters worse, Rachel is a missionary living with a remote tribe somewhere in the Pantanal, a massive wetland region in South America.  Phelan's lawyer tasks his recovering alcoholic colleague, Nate O'Riley, with finding the heiress.  Also, this all takes place around Christmas, and Nate is repeatedly clear about his intense dislike of the holiday spirit.

Pictured: the real war on Christmas

Despite appearances, Grisham doesn't seem to own any tourism ventures in the Pantanal.  Half the story focuses on how much O'Riley hates Christmas, loves alcohol, and just wants to make it out of the Pantanal alive.  The other half focuses on just how scummy and vulturish Phelan's kids and grandkids are.  This part would be more interesting if Phelan hadn't explained how his plan to make sure they got nothing worked, and this is a John Grisham novel: the bad guys never win, or at least not completely.  So, half the time we're stuck with a pretty unsympathetic screw-up as he tries not to get eaten by alligators in a pseudo-adventure story, and the other half of the time we just hear about a clan of unsympathetic screw-ups as they try to carve off a piece of the estate of an unsympathetic billionaire.  The people you're clearly supposed to be rooting for are annoying, the people you're supposed to hate are just exasperating, and it really just drifts aimlessly.  By the time O'Riley finds Rachel you're as sick of the journey as he is, and then there's just another level of frustration when you find out [SPOILER]--- she doesn't want the goddamn money!     

This is an aimless, boring, and all around pointless novel.  

Bestsellers of 1999:

1. The Testament by John Grisham

2. Hannibal by Thomas Harris

3. Assassins by Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye

4. Star Wars: Episode 1, The Phantom Menace by Terry Brooks

5. Timeline by Michael Crichton

6. Hearts in Atlantis by Stephen King

7. Apollyon by Jerry B. Jenkins and Time LaHaye

8. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King

9. Irresistible Forces by Danielle Steel

10. Tara Road by Maeve Binchy

Also Published in 1999:

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

Battle Royale by Koushun Takami

1998: The Street Lawyer by John Grisham

The Author:

John Grisham (1955-    ) was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, the son of a construction worker. At the age of twelve, his family moved to Southaven, Mississippi.  He graduated with a B.S. from Mississippi State University in 1979.  He passed the Mississippi Bar exam in 1981, and received his J.D. from the University of Mississippi.  In 1981, he married Renee Jones, with whom he had two children. 

Grisham began a successful law practice in 1981, starting in criminal law, and moving to more lucrative civil law.  In 1984, he was elected to the Mississippi State House of Representatives, a position he held in addition to running his law practice.  A case he witnessed while in the state legislature led him to write his first novel, A Time to Kill (1989).  He had trouble finding an agent and publisher.  He eventually found both, and a limited run of 5,000 copies was printed of his first novel.  In 1990, Grisham resigned from his position on state legislature and retired his practice.  In 1991, Doubleday published his second novel, The Firm.  It was a massive commercial success, as were his third and fourth novels, The Pelican Brief (1992) and The Client (1993).  His fourth book, The Chamber (1994) is the first of eleven novels to become the number one annual bestselling novel in the U.S.

Since 1989, Grisham has published a total of 29 novels, five children's books, and a work of non-fiction.  His family splits its time between homes in Oxford, Mississippi, Charlottesville, Virginia, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  Grisham also serves as a board member on the Innocence Project.  

The Book:

1st edition cover

Length: 348 pages

Subject/Genre: Homelessness PSA/Legal thriller

Michael Brock was an up-and-coming anti-trust lawyer on his way to a partnership in a big DC firm, then the unthinkable happened.  A homeless man barged into the law office and held several of the lawyers hostage, including Brock.  He then berated them for their heartlessness towards the more needy, before mentioning something about an eviction and having his head blown off by a police sniper.  This may sound like the beginning of Quentin Tarantino's A Christmas Carol, but is really the impetus for what Grisham presents as a serious look at the plight of the homeless.    

First, let me say that the plight of the homeless isn't a joke, and that a society with more than enough food and resources to care for all its members and still doesn't needs to take a good long look in the mirror.  Michael Brock, after his harrowing experience, contacts the 14th street legal clinic, who represented the kidnapper previously.  He agrees to volunteer at a homeless shelter with a lawyer from the clinic, where he meets an adorable child and his family.  Said child and family freeze to death soon after, leading Brock to take steps in seeking justice.  This is one big problem I have with the novel.  Pretty much every character exists solely to spur on Brock's development, with no real motivation of their own.  His relatives are one-dimensional success-oriented cardboard cutouts, the homeless characters are extras borrowed from The Fisher King, and Michael Brock is a Scrooge-like persona, sliding from 'self-centered rich yuppie' to 'beleaguered defender of the downtrodden.'  For a book that clearly presents itself as having a clear moral purpose (helping the homeless), the homeless play a pretty small part in it.  It's about the brave lawyer turning down a promising career as a soulless attache to the rich in favor of becoming a brave lawyer with a heart of gold.  He further undermines his own point by focusing the plot on a criminal conspiracy against a group of homeless people, which, while it allows for a happy ending where they stick it to the man, detracts attention from the completely legal ways in which our current system is unjust.  Despite some sentimental speeches about society's apathy, the majority of the novel paints the altruistic lawyer as the salvation of America's homeless, at the same time relieving the readers of the sense of responsibility the novel is supposed to instill.  

I realize I'm being pretty harsh, but let me say that it's a good thing Grisham used his reach as a public figure to draw attention to a good cause.  As a novel, it's better than last week's The Partner as well as The Testament (which I'll review next Monday).  If you have some insatiable urge to read a Grisham novel, and this is the only one available, go right ahead.  Otherwise, skip it.

Bestsellers of 1998:

1. The Street Lawyer by John Grisham

2. Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy

3. Bag of Bones by Stephen King

4. A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe

5. Mirror Image by Danielle Steel

6. The Long Road Home by Danielle Steel

7. The Klone and I by Danielle Steel

8. Point of Origin by Patricia Cornwell

9. Paradise by Toni Morrison

10. You Belong to Me by Mary Higgins Clark

Also Published in 1998:

The Hours by Michael Cunningham

The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

Holes by Louis Sachar

1994: The Chamber by John Grisham

The Author:

John Grisham (1955-    ) was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, the son of a construction worker. At the age of twelve, his family moved to Southaven, Mississippi.  He graduated with a B.S. from Mississippi State University in 1979.  He passed the Mississippi Bar exam in 1981, and received his J.D. from the University of Mississippi.  In 1981, he married Renee Jones, with whom he had two children.  

Grisham began a successful law practice in 1981, starting in criminal law, and moving to more lucrative civil law.  In 1984, he was elected to the Mississippi State House of Representatives, a position he held in addition to running his law practice.  A case he witnessed while in the state legislature led him to write his first novel, A Time to Kill (1989).  He had trouble finding an agent and publisher.  He eventually found both, and a limited run of 5,000 copies was printed of his first novel.  In 1990, Grisham resigned from his position on state legislature and retired his practice.  In 1991, Doubleday published his second novel, The Firm.  It was a massive commercial success, as were his third and fourth novels, The Pelican Brief (1992) and The Client (1993).  His fourth book, The Chamber (1994) is the first of eleven novels to become the number one annual bestselling novel in the U.S.

Since 1989, Grisham has published a total of 28 novels, four children's books, and a work of non-fiction.  His family splits its time between homes in Oxford, Mississippi, Charlottesville, Virginia, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  Grisham also serves as a board member on the Innocence Project.

The Book:

Length: 486 pages
Subject/Genre: Death Penalty Litigation/Legal Thriller

The Chamber begins in 1967 in rural Mississippi.  Sam Cayhall, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, assists in the bombing of a Jewish lawyer's office as part of the KKK's bombing campaign against civil rights activists. The bomb is set by another man, Rollie Wedge, and is put on a timer.  The bomb detonates later that morning, killing the lawyer's twin children, and crippling the lawyer.  Cayhall is caught by the police.  He is tried, but the jury is stacked in his favor and is deadlocked.  The same happens in a retrial.  Fourteen years pass, attitudes change, and a new D.A., looking to make a name for himself, brings Cayhall back on trial.  With testimony from the former imperial wizard of the KKK, Cayhall is convicted and given the death penalty.

In Chicago, young lawyer Adam Hall works for the major firm Kravitz & Bane, which had been representing Cayhall through his appeals as part of their pro bono program.  Hall admits that, after his father's suicide when Hall was seventeen, he learned that he was Sam Cayhall's grandson.  Hall goes on to say that he is against the death penalty in principle, and wants to represent his grandfather.  This he does, and heads out to Mississippi, connecting with his family's dark past and the legal vagaries of death penalty litigation.  

Grisham's novel strikes me as the equivalent of a strong episode of a tv courtroom drama.  There's a lot of investigation and legal maneuvering, and a lot of tension over whether or not Cayhall will be executed. The characters come up against a lot of serious, morally troublesome issues, not the least of which is the death penalty itself.  However, these issues are not dealt with to any depth.  While I don't expect a fifty page treatise debating the morality of capital punishment, the pro arguments are basically 'it's justice/it gives closure' and the con arguments are just 'killing is wrong/it doesn't help anyone.'  None of these points are argued beyond them being mentioned in conversation, and what could be a deep exploration of an incredibly contentious moral dilemma isn't really dealt with at all.  Grisham acknowledges that there is such a dilemma, his characters take one side or the other, but all he really does is have people ask if it's really good or bad (I mean, he literally has them ask, a lot).  It's easy for this novel to seem a lot deeper than it is, because it brings up serious topics, but it doesn't really have anything interesting to say about them.


The novel was adapted to film in 1996.  The Chamber starred Gene Hackman as Sam Cayhall, Faye Dunaway as Lee Cayhall, and Chris O'Donnell as Adam Hall.

The film was a critical catastrophe, with even Grisham himself describing it as "a train wreck."  It did, however, receive one award nomination: Faye Dunaway for worst supporting actress at the 1997 Razzies.


Make no mistake, though, the novel was entertaining.  It's like a good episode of Law & Order.  If you want something entertaining to read that will kill time, The Chamber is a good choice.

Bestsellers of 1994:

1. The Chamber by John Grisham

2. Debt of Honor by Tom Clancy

3. The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield

4. The Gift by Danielle Steel

5. Insomnia by Stephen King

6. Politically Correct Bedtime Stories by James Finn Garner

7. Wings by Danielle Steel

8. Accident by Danielle Steel

9. Disclosure by Michael Crichton

10. Remember Me by Marry Higgins Clark

Also Published in 1994:

Closing Time by Joseph Heller

Gun, with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem

Sources:

Grisham, John. The Chamber. New York: Doubleday, 1994. Print.

"John Grisham." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2014. Literature Resource 
     Center. Web.