Michiko
Kakutani slices and dices popular hack scribbler John Grisham in her
scorching NYT review back in 1995. Go get 'em, Michiko!
THE RAINMAKER By John Grisham
Part
of the appeal of John Grisham's humongously popular novels has always
rested in their grabby beginnings, their twisty, if disorganized, plots.
Unlike Scott Turow, Mr. Grisham has never excelled at creating
psychologically nuanced characters or used anything but the most
pedestrian prose. His latest book, "The Rainmaker," lacks even his
patented narrative hooks. The novel gets off to a plodding, colorless
start, decelerates into a wholly predictable tale of David and Goliath,
and finishes up with a manic flurry of ridiculously implausible events
including, in the last 30 pages alone, a crucial court decision, a
sudden murder, the loss of millions of dollars, the revelation of a
money-skimming scam and the abrupt decision on the part of the hero and
heroine to start completely new lives.
Given such weaknesses, why
do Mr. Grisham's novels routinely zoom to the top of the best-seller
lists? Much of his success, of course, has to do with his subject
matter. In recent years, the law and lawyers have taken center stage in
American life: a development attested to not only by the high visibility
of trials involving O. J. Simpson, the Menendez brothers, Lorena
Bobbitt and other cases broadcast on CNN and Court TV, but also by the
increasingly noisy public debate over individual rights and
responsibilities, freedoms and regulations.
Mr. Grisham has
cashed in on our society's simultaneous suspicion of and dependency on
lawyers by giving the reader a seemingly intimate look at their rarefied
world. In "The Rainmaker," he peppers his story with lots of
behind-the-scenes glimpses of courtroom maneuverings and informative
little asides about the psychology of defense motions, plea-bargaining
and jury selection. ("It's ancient wisdom that blacks make better
plaintiff's jurors," he writes. "They feel for the underdog and distrust
white corporate America.") His portraits of individual lawyers in this
novel also clumsily play into our eagerness to see members of this
profession in simple terms of good and evil, crusading idealism and
withering cynicism.
On one hand, "The Rainmaker" is filled with
slimy hustlers: ambulance chasers on the lookout for "good injuries" and
conniving corporate apologists with old-boy network connections to
morally compromised judges. On the other hand, its narrator and hero,
Rudy Baylor, is a bright young lawyer who devotes himself to defending
the rights of a terminally ill leukemia victim against the scheming
representatives of a corrupt insurance company. Like many a Capra hero
before him, Rudy is an emissary of the little man, David pitted against a
bureaucratic giant.
Rudy, the reader quickly realizes, is also a
close relative of two earlier Grisham characters: Darby Shaw, the
brilliant law student who helps uncover a nefarious assassination plot
in "The Pelican Brief," and Mitch McDeere, the recent law school
graduate in "The Firm," who finds himself in a high-paying but highly
dangerous job with a Mafia-sponsored firm.
In many ways, Rudy is
Mitch's alter ego: poor, whereas Mitch is prosperous; desperate for work
after graduating from a small-time law school, whereas Mitch is the
much-courted graduate of Harvard. Unfortunately for the reader, there
isn't much more to Rudy's character, and for the time being no actor
like Tom Cruise to flesh out his personality even marginally. Indeed,
Rudy is defined almost entirely by external events: he's in debt and
unemployed; he has a lousy car and no place to live. After law school,
he knocks on a lot of doors in an effort to find a job and ends up
working for a dubious lawyer with the even more dubious name of Bruiser
Stone, who posts him at a Memphis hospital to try to sign up fresh new
accident victims. We are supposed to like Rudy because he's patronized
by Ivy League types, because he's been dumped by his former girlfriend
and because he dreams of being "an instant rainmaker, a bright young
star with a golden touch."
Rudy's first big case involves Donny
Ray Black, a young man with acute leukemia, who is on the verge of dying
because his insurance company has refused to pay for a bone marrow
transplant. Rudy files suit on behalf of Donny Ray and his parents and,
in his very first courtroom appearance, finds himself up against one of
Memphis's most legendary lawyers and his backup team of assistants.
There is not a moment of doubt, however, as to the outcome of this case:
the reader knows from the instant Donny Ray's story has been described,
which happens on page 14, exactly what will happen. It only takes Mr.
Grisham 400 pages or so to get there.
In a desperate effort to
liven up his story, Mr. Grisham tosses the reader a veritable school of
red herrings: a supposedly rich and lonely old widow who asks Rudy to
draw up her will, a mysterious case of arson in which Rudy is a suspect,
a lucrative scheme involving topless bars, a romance with a beautiful
woman who is being stalked by her abusive husband, and an assortment of
subsidiary cases involving accident victims and walk-in referrals.
Mr.
Grisham makes only the most perfunctory effort to tie all these
elements together into a coherent plot and makes even less of an attempt
to relate them in an interesting or believable fashion. His dialogue
tends to consist of people trading cliches like "take the money and run"
and "save the best for last." One fairly typical exchange between Rudy
and his girlfriend goes like this:
SHE: "I'd like to see mountains."
HE: "Me too. East or West?"
SHE: "Big mountains."
HE: "Then West it is."
SHE: "I want to see snow.'
HE: "I think we can find some."
This
conversation occurs near the end of "The Rainmaker." Given the
leadenness of Mr. Grisham's prose, the banality of his characters and
the shocking predictability of his story, it's hard to imagine how many
readers will have made it this far.
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