2002: The Summons 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: 341 Pages

Subject/Genre: Crime?/Legal "thriller"  

The Summons focuses on Ray Atlee, a law professor at the University of Virginia.  His father, an elderly, dying chancery judge, sends him a summons (like the title.  Get it?!) to come back to Clanton, Mississippi (the setting for other Grisham novels, including The Chamber) to discuss the will.  Ray's addict brother, Forrest, is also sent a summons.  When Ray arrives, his father has already passed away, leaving a handwritten will declaring Ray the executor and asking that everything be split 50/50 between Ray and Forrest.  The family, though descended from southern gentry, was never well off, so imagine Ray's surprise when he finds about three million dollars in cash hidden in his father's house. Just so you know, it takes over seventy pages for the novel to get this far into the story.  There's a lot of brooding about how Ray's father was always so distant, bitter nostalgia about small town Mississippi, and a subplot about Ray's divorce that never goes anywhere.  

Anyway, Forrest arrives, and they call the coroner.  Someone tries to break into the house and take the money, but Ray had already moved it.  In fact, much of the rest of the novel details Ray's attempts to hide the money, to find out where it came from, and to figure out who's trying to find the cash.  The first is interesting until it becomes tedious, the second is interesting until the cop-out ending, the third is self-defeating, because the pursuer's method of intimidation (anonymous notes left on his car, etc.) show that he knows where Ray is, but won't harm him.  Because with the information  we know the pursuer has, he could just shove Ray into the back of a van and get him to say where the money is. That the pursuer can, but doesn't, do anything like that, tells me as a reader that he's not a serious threat, which of course leads up to a pointless twist ending.    

This novel is just tedious.  Ray spends half his time drenching himself in nostalgia and recriminations.  His quest for the source of his father's money is mostly comprised of dead ends, but that's only because he waits until the very end of the book to look through his father's papers.  Ray points out again and again his father's annoying habit of keeping pretty much every document for the last fifty years of his life, but for some reason doesn't bother to check the papers for clues, clues which he finds on his first day of looking, and which leads him directly to the source of the money.  There's no reason Ray didn't check the papers first, except that over 100 pages of useless investigating would have to be cut from the manuscript.  This novel had no idea what it was supposed to be.  A nostalgic reflection on small town life and family?  A mystery novel about a mysterious three million and the people chasing after it?  A legal thriller about the difficulties of hiding and laundering a large sum of money?  Well, Grisham tried to do them all at once, and it didn't really work.

Bestsellers of 2002:

1. The Summons by John Grisham
2. Red Rabbit by Tom Clancy
3. The Remnant by Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye
4. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
5. Prey by Michael Crichton
6. Skipping Christmas by John Grisham
7. The Shelters of Stone by Jean Auel
8. Four Blind Mice by James Patterson
9. Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales by Stephen King
10. The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus 

Also published in 2002:

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

1921: Main Street by Sinclair Lewis

Who?

            Harry Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), better know as ‘Sinclair Lewis,’ was born in the village of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, which would later become the basis for Main Street.  In 1903, he began attending Yale University, taking time off in 1906 to join (as a janitor) Helicon Hall, a cooperative living community created and run by The Jungle novelist, Upton Sinclair.  He graduated from Yale in 1908, and lived briefly in New York and California before settling in Washington D.C.  He occasionally sold story plots to Jack London and in 1914 he married Grace Livingston Hegger.  In 1917, Sinclair and Grace had a son named Wells, who was killed in World War Two.  In 1925, Grace and Lewis divorced.  Lewis married Dorothy Thompson in 1928, and had another son, Michael.  The two divorced in 1942.

            Between 1912 and 1920, Lewis wrote several novels, none of which were very successful.  Main Street, published in 1920, became his first huge success, followed by Babbit (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), and Elmer Gantry (1927).    In 1930, Lewis became the first American author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.  In the following years, he wrote eleven more novels, none of which “equalled the success or stature of hischeifworks of the twenties.”  After his divorce from Thompson, Lewis lived mainly in Europe.  He had an ongoing problem with alcohol which was a major contributing factor in fatal heart attack.  He died in a clinic on the outskirts of Rome.

So what's this book about?

            Main Street tells the story of Carol Milford, an intelligent and idealistic librarian from Saint Paul, Minnesota.  She falls in love with small-town doctor, Will Kennicott, and agrees to marry and moves with him to his small hometown of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota.  She plans to improve the town, but finds a town ensnared in pettiness, arrogance, and conceit.  The only people she can connect with are the poor immigrants, whom the elite of Gopher Prairie are dependent on and disdainful of.     

            This novel is a scathing satire of the American small town.  In Main Street, Lewis strips away the mythology of the kind and gentle Midwesterner and shows the crooked and self-involved power struggles within the town of Gopher Prairie and all those like it.  The protagonist tries to circumvent the web of jealousy and pride that makes up the town’s mentality, but finds this to be as much a part of the town as the dilapidated buildings. 

            The portrait Lewis paints of Gopher Prairie is exhaustive: in the sense of its completeness and in the sense of its frequently overwhelming, if not superfluous, detail.  Lewis’s prose leaves much to be desired.  Mark Schorer, in his painstakingly researched, tomeful biography Sinclair Lewis, an American Life, concludes that “He was one of the worst writers in modern American Literature, but without his writing one cannot imagine modern American literature” (813).    I wouldn’t go so far as to use the superlative “worst,” but compared to the other ‘greats’ of early 20^th century American literature, Lewis is conspicuously lacking in style.  

Why was it so popular? 

           As opposed to the other novels so far reviewed, Main Street is incredibly critical of not only American mentalities but specifically rural America.  Whereas the others either  praised the rustic (e.g., The Eyes of the World, Zane Grey’s novels) or found fault in industrialization (e.g. The Inside of the Cup, The Turmoil), Lewis spends over four hundred pages pointing out the hypocrisy of middle America. 

            There are, of course, contemporary issues raised in the course of the novel.  Woman’s suffrage and the role of women in society was dealt with frequently, as was the role of immigrants and labor unions.  Consider that this was published in 1920, the year the United States ratified the 19^th amendment, guaranteeing the women’s right to vote.  This was also written and published at the height of the First Red Scare.  The federal government had been called out to violently end labor strikes.  Anti-immigrant and anti-anarchist sentiment was at a peak; the Immigration Act of 1918 gave the government the ability to deport any immigrants with anarchist connections or ideals.     

            To one extent or another, Main Street calls the American people out on all these issues. 

So why haven't I heard of it?

            It seems that some high schools do (or at least used to) have Main Street as compulsory reading.  Main Street is a slow book.  That isn’t to say the pacing drags, just that it requires a good amount of patience.  And, as I mentioned earlier, Lewis’s prose is not particularly elegant or forceful.  As a study of the small town mentality, currently as well as in the early 20^th century, Main Street is fantastic, but that may not be enough to get people to take the time and effort to read it.

Should I read it?

            Yes.  Despite my griping about the prose, the story is strong.  It presents a sometimes infuriating picture of small town politics and the social and economic challenges that grow from that, challenges that are still relevant today.

You can read Main Street on Project Gutenberg.  

Also published in 1921:    

John Galsworthy - To Let (last part of the Forsyte Saga)

George Moore - Heloise and Abelard

Sources:
     Lewis, Sinclair. Main Street. 1920. Mattituck, New York: Amereon House, 1948. Print.
     Schorer, Mark. Sinclair Lewis: An American Life. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961. Print.