This week, John Grisham has not one but two novels on the NYTimes bestseller list. And the whole back page of this week’s New
Yorker is taken up with an ad for these: suggesting that an audience of (relatively discriminating) New
Yorker calibre might be
interested. What is the
attraction?
And so, despite a recent bad experience with
another Grisham potboiler (panned here), like Charlie Brown having just
one more whack at the football held by (reliably) unreliable Lucy, I reached down a well-known title from
my wife’s discard shelf: The
Pelican Brief (1992).
It’s kind of a catchy title; further, the basic premise of the
thriller -- the murder of multiple Supreme-Court justices -- has a compelling
logic to it: such an Eingreifen into the politico-legal
landscape would indeed have much more far-reaching and long-lasting consequences
than most assassinations.
And at the hands of a former lawyer (like Grisham) an engrossing glimpse
into the ins and outs of Constitutional theory and practice should be central to the plot, and
quite instructive.
And what a movie it might have made! Had I the good fortune to have
directed it, a good third of the screentime would have been devoted to
courtroom drama: but this time,
not to the sordid details of some random murder case (as in most such dramas)
but to matters of weight to the Republic; to the (generally high-level,
non-grandstanding) pleadings before the Supreme Court; and to serious
discussions of all sides of the issues
in chambers, among Justices and clerks: fine legal minds grappling with crucial conundrums. Only once the reader had been drawn in to caring about the
issues at hand, and familiarized with the stances (well-founded or
otherwise) of each of the
Justices, would one, and later another, be bumped off. It is the basic principle of the
classic dinner-party murder: The reader has to be skillfully introduced to each of
the potential victims (and suspects!), so that he cares about them or at least can recognize
them, before the foul deed is done.
Otherwise we’re simply down amid the muck of the police-blotter.
Not only does he do absolutely nothing of
that, but, amazingly for a reputed professional, Grisham makes what should
count as an authorial Rookie Error:
First comes the slaying of a character we don’t know from Adam (one of
the Justices, barely sketched-in);
then, before the blood is dry, and before reader has had time to
assimilate that atrocity (one cannot call it tragedy, in Aristotle’s sense; genuine tragedy has to be built-up-to) and attempt to care
about it, another Justice is slain
(in grotesquely pornographic circumstances that itself is an authorial offence against the dignity of
the Court), thus “stepping on” the original effect. So that it feels more like a fairgrounds cockshy than like anything which might have
interested Sophocles.
(For a while it seems as though, despite
having skimped on the victims, Grisham intends to make good via due diligence
on the suspects: there are
extended Oval Office scenes, featuring a phony unprincipled President, a
scheming power-hungry Chief of Staff, plus the heads of FBI and CIA, who, to
any properly-brought-up progressive, are villains ex officio. But nothing ever comes of it.)
The central character is a law-student who
gets interested in the case.
In accord with the socio-literary pieties of our times, it is a she, and
quickly introduced as a gorgeous athletic brilliant self-possessed do-it-all
feminist heroine (“cheerleader … graduated magna cum laude with a degree in
biology … planned to graduate magna cum laude with a degree in law, and then
make a nice living suing chemical companies for trashing the environment”), and
is given a scene in which (though arriving late to class) she effortlessly shows
up all the boys who have been
clownishly ducking and dodging, unable to answer the lecturer’s trenchant questions. Well, fine (sigh); and useful for the movies. Dramatically, the choice of such
an outsider to get drawn in to lethal and unsuspected depths, is an excellent
old chestnut of the Man Who Knew Too Much school (cinematically brilliantly depicted in, for example, “Six
Days of the Condor”). Why such
a person, with no especial connections, working alone, and stranded out in
Louisiana or somewhere, is able almost instantly
to penetrate to the solution to the case (and this, without leaving the
library), where the police, the White House, the FBI, the CIA, and a special
spontaneous Let’s-Put-On-a-Play scratch-team of Supreme Court employees who
throw themselves as amateurs into their
own investigation (in another kind of movie, of the Bad News Bears motif, these
junior sherlocks would have been the ones to crack the case, though here this
wrinkle is immediately forgotten) all mill around spinning their wheels and getting nowhere, is left unexplained (and puts the plot
down into the adolescent-wet-dream subbasement of Superhero fantasies, quite
foreign to the taste of Eustace Tilly’s cognoscenti).
As a side-thread, she is having an affair with
her ConLaw professor (author checks off that box; naturally the silver screen will require a bit of that sort
of thing). But sociopolitically
(in the current climate), the matter is dicey. The reader is supposed to sympathize with everything
that WonderDamsel does, including her choices for her love-life. But the professor is male, and superordinate in the power-structure, and several years her elder, and therefore
(as dictated by the pieties, vid. sup.) scum. What to do? Well, the author makes him a
grotesque drunkard, so that we can all righteously sneer down at him (and,
interrestingly, though at a semi-conscious subtext level, suggestive of
impotence, hence he is merely a toy
and never an actual sexual threat
-- the figure of the Castrated Rapist, as it were), and then -- startlingly early from a
narrative standpoint, given the man’s prominence in the early sections (thus, a
structural defect) -- summarily yanked from the stage, as though by the
proverbial shepherd’s-crook of the cartoons: somebody smashes his lecherous head like a watermelon, or
whatever. Cross out
politically-incorrect love-interest;
call Casting for a socially acceptable replacement.
This arrives in the form of a crusading Bob
Woodward-style newsman (he even works for WaPo), who, despite his journalistic eminence,
takes orders from her meekly, like a little boy (for she had suddenly, after a few days on the run, become
an expert in clandestine tradecraft). And though he is of course attracted to her (like the entire world, Princess), and
though he is repeatedly (at her invitation -- she calls all the shots) drawn
into potentially libidinous situations, he ever and again simply sleeps on the
couch, dutifully neutered in line
with the requirements of present dogma (at which later ages will gape).
*
The featured blurb, from the NYTimes Book
Review, atop the cover of the paperback edition my wife initially fished
out from some remainder-bin (“Half off all titles”), stated:
“A
genuine page-turner.”
And here I must concur, in both a good
sense and a bad.
It is the sort of book which is best consumed
in circumstances where you do not invest overmuch attention or insight: either amid the hectic distractions of
air-travel, or, on the contrary, late on a tired Friday, before bedtime, the
brandy-glass sampled, then emptied, then re-filled, mind wandering off the page
and lazily back to it, the depictions of campus affairs evoking fond (or
frightful) memories of one’s own, the chase-scenes allowing you to lie back and
close your eyes, imagining how your favorite director might stage them --
nothing much riding on all this
one way or the other.
Amid the general background murmur of workmanlike prose, there is the
occasional phrase (“They power-schmoozed with senators”) felicitous by the
relaxed standards of the post-prandial, pre-somnial bedside reading-lamp, or
cinematic imagery (“She draped her legs across his lap” -- the later
screenwriter will bite his lip, wondering whether to swipe the trope, or to can
it and come up with his own take), so that for the first hundred pages or so the pages really did turn effortlessly, as by themselves,
requiring no more digital exertion than the text did mental.
But in time, it dawns on the reader that the mainspring of the killings
really is that blasted pelican -- endangered down in the bayou, thus foiling
the envirocidal plottings of an oilman (boo!) whom we eventually meet as a cartoonish
melding of Mr Kurtz and late-life Howard Hughes, who is somehow able to recruit
a host of killers including a Carlos-the-Jackal lookalike -- ah but the plot is
too stupid to summarize. By then
we are no longer turning the pages,
but flipping them, faster and faster,
like those day-calendar sheets blowing rapidly off in a cinematic wind to
symbolize the passing of time.
The thing drags, and bogs down…
It is as though Grisham had received a contract for a 400-pp. novel, but
had misread it as “300”, and only after he had expended his last twist and
least idea, did his agent inform him that, per contract, a further hundred
pages were required, so that Grisham had to grind grind grind, or perhaps hand
the task off to some uncredited amanuensis, like the apprentices who
finished-in the details after Michaelangelo had drawn the main scheme and
toddled off to the winehouse.
*
Ah well, the man continues to get away with
it, and to bank the results, as ever new generations of unilluminati are
born-yesterday. No doubt his
latest efforts will make it to the screen as well -- or, in accord with continuing
developments, perhaps becomes comic-books or video-games.
