Grisham Recap

This is the sort of thing that givew the Internet a bad name.

Oh, and I mentioned like a ton of my friends in this note, until I got tired of that little drop down menu thingie, so if you absolutely hate this and wonder why I mentioned you, I was just sort of adding everyone. Although I don't see why that would make you feel any better, but still. It's the principle of the thing.

John Grisham is one of the most popular authors of the last couple decades, writing twentyish bestsellers and getting great reviews and everything. But not everyone has time to read Grisham, some are simply stupid, others are pretentious jerks who think that they need to read Shakespeare all the time.

It’s not like they’re missing much, because all of John Grisham’s books have essentially the same plot and all sport stupid two-dimensional characters. But there’s this whole cultural literacy thing, and anyone who doesn’t have a passing familiarity with Grisham will eventually lose all their friends and have a ninety percent chance of getting divorced. (The only exception to this rule are lawyers—they already don’t have any friends, and in most cases pretty much come with at least two angry ex-wives).

So I’m here to provide you was detailed recaps of Grisham’s many novels, so that you too can partake of this intellectual feast. (“Intellectual”, in this case being used loosely).

A Time to Kill
No idea what’s it’s about, never read this one

The Firm
Didn’t quite finish this one, although I seem to remember that it was about a lawyer who accidentally got himself into a law firm run by the Mafia, which doesn’t seem to paint either the lawyer or the firm as being geniuses. I mean, if you were running a Mafia law firm, wouldn’t you want your lawyers to know what they were getting in to? And if you can’t tell when a firm is controlled by organized crime, then you’re probably not a prime candidate for law school. Anyway, I’m sure this book has a happy ending.

The Pelican Brief
I actually finished this one, and showcases Grisham at his finest—awful dialogue, unbelievable characters, and an incomprehensible plot. There’s this law student, Darby, who’s the girlfriend of her law professor, who’s about twice her age. I got a “creepy old man” vibe from the whole relationship, but apparently the law professor's supposed to be a good guy. At least until he gets blown up in a car bomb meant for Darby to make sure that no one finds out that she knows the reason two Supreme Court justices got assassinated. Although you’d think using a car bomb would pretty much scream “something suspicious here” and people would investigate and find out whatever Darby found out, so the fact that it failed probably didn’t matter that much. The villain must have gone to the Bond Villain Assassination School.

The villain in this story is a big corporation (a common Grisham theme), which wants to drill for oil in Louisiana wetlands. To do this, it a) kills two Supreme Court justices, b) uses a car bomb to try to kill a college student, and c) hire dozens of operatives to try to kill aforementioned college student after the car bomb fails. It’s not as spectacular, but I’d think that it’s easier to just bribe EPA officials.

The Client
I didn’t read this one, but my brother did. He said it showed how an eleven year old kid managed to evade both the law and the mob to solve a murder case. He said it was pretty hard to buy, and I’d agree with him.

The Chamber
Okay, there’s this young lawyer who tries to prevent the execution of his grandfather, who bombed a black family in the Sixties. He fails, Gramps fries, and good riddance.

I think this story was supposed to make you think about capital punishment, but considering Gramps was a total jerk and racist to boot, I came away thankful that we have it. Screw those murderers.

The Rainmaker
There’s this absolutely pathetic law student who can’t get into any regular law firms, so he find himself working for a mob law firm (hey, just like The Firm! And who knew that the Mafia was so into law firms? Maybe I’ve just led a sheltered life, but I’ve always thought they were more into prostitution and bookies and stuff. I wasn’t a faithful watcher of the Sopranos, but I don’t think that Tony was a big lawyer person).

Fortunately, this is a nice Mafia firm, and our boy Rudy stumbles on the case of an eeevil insurance company eeevily (you gotta hit those e’s hard for the right effect) denying treatment to this kid with leukemia, for no real reason. He sues, and helped by the fact that the judge is totally on this side and the other lawyer is an idiot (he—the other lawyer—gets attacked by a juror, which you’d think might raise some eyebrows around the old courthouse water cooler), he wins, but the jury gets carried away and bankrupts the insurance company, so our poor leukemia people don’t get anything. (I didn’t like them much anyway). So Rudy runs off with this girl he met, after killing her husband.

The Runaway Jury
This is one of Grisham’s more popular and stupid books, and I’ll leave it to you to decide whether there’s a connection there.

Scenario: your girlfriends parent died of lung cancer. She wants to do something about it. You
a) find a new, less activist girlfriend.
b) Become an anti-tobacco terrorist.
c) Sue.
The correct answer, of course, is d) go around the country trying to get on a jury for a anti-tobacco lawsuit and influence the other jurors against the tobacco company.

Sounds easy, right? Well, it’s not. There’s always those recalcitrant jurors who favor the tobacco company. But fortunately, our hero is able to frighten one away by stalking her by proxy, plants incriminating evidence against another, and poisons the last. You’d think that maybe that would call for a mistrial, but no, the judge is pretty much fine with all these shenanigans. Even when the maverick juror starts calling him at home, the judge just kind of goes along.

Anyway, the evil tobacco company loses a whole lot of money in a blatant miscarriage of justice.

Full disclosure: I set tobacco one summer. It was awful.

The Partner
I don’t remember much about this book. There’s this criminal who gets arrested by the FBI, and plans things to he doesn’t have to spend any time in jail, but his girlfriend steals all his money and I guess he’s disappointed. By the way, I guess I should have mentioned that there would be spoilers.

The Street Lawyer
This was the first Grisham book I read. I shattered some illusions—here I was thinking that Grisham would be a brilliant word wizard, and then find out the truth. It was like learning that there is no Santa Claus. Anyway, there’s this lawyer—I forget his name, so I’ll just call his SL (Street Lawyer), who almost gets killed by a homicidal homeless person. The cops kill Homeless Terrorist, which, for some incomprehensible reason, cause SL to feel guilty about the homeless. Personally, I’d start donating money to tough-on-crime Republicans and maybe run over a homeless person or two in retaliation, but I guess that’s why I’m not in a Grisham novel. Anyway, SL sues his firm for evicting some homeless scum, which sadly seems to be illegal. This is front page news in the Grishamverse, and SL wins and his old firm starts caring about the homeless, which I thought made for a sad ending.

The Testament
Some old guy writes his will to leave everything to this one niece or something who’s a South America missionary. He then rolls his wheelchair off a balcony, so it’s evident he’s not all there. And his niece can work miracles sometimes, which I thought was odd. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it just struck me as unusual.

Actually, this is one of Grisham’s better books.

The Brethren
Three jailed judges run a gay-blackmailing operation from prison. Personally, if I was in prison, I’d stay away from any sort of homosexual topics; given what goes on in shower rooms there, it just doesn’t seem to be a good idea.

Parallel plot line: the CIA, the same bunch of guys who thought Saddam had lots of WMD’s and has spent fifty years trying to get rid of Castro, decides to run its own presidential candidate. Right. He runs, of course, on the threat posed by WMD’s. Good call, CIA.

Of all the people in government, the CIA candidate is the one person who gets caught in the Brethren’s (those are our incarcerated judges, if you’re confused) gay blackmail scheme. What’re the odds, huh? Anyway, the CIA find a way around it, which oddly doesn’t involve just offing the Brethren. Because with everything Grisham thinks the CIA can do, killing three obscure, imprisoned judges is totally out of the question.

Grisham wrote a lot of other books and stuff, but that’s all I’m doing today. Final are next week, so I’m thinking that maybe I’ve got better things to do than recap books. And it’s not like you’ve read this far anyway, to it’s not like you’re missing anything. In fact, I don’t know why I even bothered to write this, because most of my friends actually study for their finals, which strikes me as a good idea. Even if I’ll probably forget to actually do so.