Bad Grisham still pretty good – despite itself
Rogue Lawyer, the new legal thriller by John Grisham, is a deeply engaging and enjoyable book that also happens to be bad in ways almost too numerous to count. Still, let’s try! First: Its premise sure appears to be lifted wholecloth from the extremely popular
Lincoln Lawyer novels by Michael Connelly. Grisham’s hero, Sebastian Rudd, is, like Connelly’s Mickey Haller, a defense lawyer working out of a motor vehicle instead of an office — with loose morals, a former client acting as driver and muscle, a host of family problems, and a smart-alecky first-person voice.
Bonus point here: Rudd admits to reading Connelly’s novels in his free time.
Second: Rudd is supposed to be one of those superficially unlikable heroes we end up loving, like Haller. Instead he’s just … unlikable.
For instance, he’s an awful father. And it’s not because of any particular emotional block or conflict; he’s just crummy at it. He forgets plans with his son, he takes him to an MMA fight that erupts into a riotous murder scene — fully justifying the reservations of his supposedly uptight ex-wife — and finally, surpassing himself, he lets the child get kidnapped on his watch.
Third: It’s brimming with cheeseball lines casting Rudd as the savior of the unnamed midsize American city where he lives, such as, “I’m a lone gunman, a rogue who fights the system and hates injustice…” Or — try it in Christian Bale’s voice — “A lawyer like me is forced to work in the shadows …”
Fourth: Its characters are not paper-thin, because paper is as thick as a thick, juicy steak compared to them. Especially egregious in this regard is Rudd’s son’s schoolteacher, whom Rudd starts dating — itself an iffy choice — and whose role consists primarily of begging Rudd to take
her to an MMA fight, confirming his weirdly misogynistic rants about his ex-wife, and being super-sexy.
Fifth — well, but you get it by now. Even by Grisham’s inconsis- tent standards, Rogue Lawyer is a weak novel.
And yet I couldn’t stop reading it. That’s because of the quality that saves Grisham from himself again and again, which is how relentlessly interesting he is when he’s writing about the law. Each of Rudd’s clients, from the victim of a raid by an absurdly militarized police team to a death row inmate trying to beat the needle, showcases the author’s magical trait, which is his ability to find intense drama in the little skirmishes that play out across our legal system every day.
Good, in other words; bad, too. Grisham.