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A Fading Formula
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11240 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1993 |
2,990 Words |
| Author
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Robert F. Geary
Robert F. Geary is head of the English Department at James
Madison University. His academic interests include the gothic
novel and its literary descendants. |
THE CLIENT
John Grisham
New York: Doubleday, 1993
412 pp., $25.00
A reader unfamiliar with John Grisham's earlier megahits The Firm and The Pelican Brief may come away from his newest novel wondering what could possibly account for their popularity. Dust jacket blurbs about Grisham having stretched the limits of the legal thriller and his publisher's claim that Grisham is "one of the most popular authors of our time" evoke not just the usual dash of skepticism but a sense of downright bafflement. The Client's plot is predictable and unintelligent, its characters stereotypical and faintly unpleasant, and its thrills few. With an abundance of well-crafted stories of mystery and suspense available, what is it about Grisham's books that have made the previous two best-sellers? Because there is little to grip a reader's attention in his latest effort, one can discern the outlines of the formula Grisham has employed with such success since finishing his first, best, and least known novel, A Time to Kill (1989).
Like many thrillers, The Client begins with an innocent person unwittingly becoming ensnared in a web of evil and finding himself the target of ruthless assassins. Here, however, Grisham initially avoids making the primary victim an attorney. Instead, Mark Sway, age eleven, and younger brother, Ricky, are plunged into a nightmare when their clandestine experiment with cigarette smoking is interrupted by a car that pulls off the nearby highway. The driver, unaware the boys are watching, quickly connects a hose to the exhaust pipe and attempts suicide. Mark bravely pulls out the hose twice before the drunken and enraged man catches him, pulls him into the car, and threatens his life. The driver, a lawyer for rising mobster Barry "the Blade" Muldanno, does at last manage to kill himself, but not before drunkenly revealing to Mark that Barry has stashed the body of his latest victim, a U.S. senator, in the lawyer's garage. Mark soon finds himself the concern of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, who need the senator's body as evidence against Muldanno, as well as the target of Muldanno and his goons, who want to silence the boy before he can lead police to the corpse.
Unfortunately, The Client's momentum slackens after this compelling opening scene. Seeking to avoid having to confess his secret to the well-intentioned but maladroit police, Mark attempts to get a lawyer and just happens to stumble into the office of Reggie (for Regina) Love, at fifty-two a feisty newcomer to the
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