JOHN GRISHAM’S MILL

But no sooner had Presumed Innocent soared to number one on the New York Times hit parade than the marketing people at every publish- ing house in the United States had the same thought: Let’s create a type. If a seriously intentioned nov- el about the attorney’s trade can sell hundreds of thousands of copies, think how many copies pop fiction will sell. If the mass audience is willing to read a lush volume about lawyerly tribulations, think how much more willing it will be to read pruned-down prose. Same make, just cheaper models. Thus was the road paved — and widened into a superhighway — for the likes of Steve Martini, William J. Cough- lin, Nancy Taylor Rosenberg, and, most notably, John Grisham.

In 1989, Grisham wrote a novel called A Time to Kill. It was earnest, derivative, a poor man’s version of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. It was worth reading. No one did. Two years later, Grisham turned out a potboiler called The Firm. The rest is commerce. On the average American beach these days, there are more John Grisham novels than sand castles. On the average Ameri- can airplane, there are more John Grisham novels than flight sickness bags. In the average American health club, there are more John Grisham novels on the newspaper racks of exercise bicycles than copies of USA Today and the Wall Street Journal put together. Now it seems as if Grisham invented the genre, and Turow is this guy who comes around every few years with the publishing equivalent of an overpriced luxury sedan.

Some pop sociologists now spec- ulate that Grisham’s popularity is due to his scathing portraits of fel- low lawyers. In The Firm, for exam- ple, the boys at Bendini, Lambert & Locke are a bunch of two-faced, three-piece-suited, four-flushing Mafia henchmen. In The Pelican Brief, the partners at White and Blazerich represent a man who or- dered the murders of two justices of the United States Supreme Court.

In The Rainmaker, the aging yuppies at Trent & Brent are so pompously vicious that one assumes they are best dealt with by a stake through the heart.

But authors have been vilifying lawyers, catering to prejudices against those who hold specialized knowledge, at least as far back as William Shakespeare’s “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” In this regard, Grisham is just another marksman sighting a fat target — no explanation here for the breadth of his appeal.

Nor is the explanation to be found in the poignancy of his endings, a tactic unusual by the standards of contemporary pop fiction. The Rainmaker concludes with young, idealistic lawyer Rudy Baylot hitting the road, vowing “never to return” to the city in which his legal career began, and never to resume the career once he reaches his eventual destination. The Firm signs off with young, idealistic lawyer Mitch McDeere hitting a longer road, fleeing the country as well as the ruination of his dreams about the glories of jurisprudence. The Client’s 11-year-old hero, Mark Sway, and his family are forced to take dubious refuge in the FBI’s Witness Protection Program, leaving behind all connection to the only lives they have ever known.

But the denouement of a novel is no more than a few pages. Grisham has trapped readers in the web of his tales long before this. And so this, too, cannot explain the phenomenon. Characters? A few are vivid, but most run the gamut from cardboard to plywood. Wordsmithery? None at all. Grisham is seldom more than functional. Exotic locales, his sexy dust jacket photos? No and no. Grisham’s main literary setting is Memphis, Tennessee; his pictures always show him with a week’s worth of stubble; and his novels now cost 30 percent more than they did just four years ago.

Not only is the reason for Grisham’s success not immediately apparent, a pattern begins to emerge that, by all rights, should have led to his failure.

Exhibit A, The Firm. At the beginning of the book, the hero learns that Bendini, Lambert & Locke may be in cahoots with the mob. In the middle of the book, he learns that they are in cahoots with the mob. At the end, he learns that they have been so cahooted. Between the initial foreshadowing and the final confirmation there are no surprises, no second thoughts, no suggestions that the reader should more closely examine the original premise. It is as if Grisham has decided to apply to the writing of fiction that old public speaker’s adage: Tell them what you’re going to tell them; tell them; tell them what you’ve told them. As a means of achieving clarity, the system is virtually foolproof. As a means of creating dramatic tension, it leaves more than a little to be desired.

To a lesser but still noticeable extent, the same puzzling directness is apparent in The Pelican Brief and The Client. That is why these three books have translated so well to the big screen. If a two-hour movie is going to be made from a novel, that novel had better be short or simple or both. Movies are hard on long, intricate works of fiction; a well-chosen word may require a thousand pictures. There is no better example of this than John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire, the cinematic version of which, in attempting to cram in most of the book’s fantastical occurrences, turned out to be the visual equivalent of Cliff Notes.

And that brings us to Grisham’s latest offering, on its way to being his biggest seller of all, The Rainmaker. The lack of plot complication here is positively breathtaking. Donny Ray Black has leukemia.

His parents are too poor to afford the bone marrow transplant that would probably save his life. His mother took out an insurance policy on Donny Ray long before the leukemia developed; in her opinion, the policy covers bone marrow transplants. In the opinion of the Great Benefit Insurance Company, it does not. Ditto the opinion of Trent & Brent, the insurer’s counsel. An impasse not only develops but lingers; as a result, Donny Ray dies at the all- too-tender age of 22.

By this time, Rudy Baylor, fresh out of a Memphis law school and rejected by the city’s more prestigious firms, is already on the case.

There ought to be moments in The Rainmaker when the reader believes that a single rookie lawyer cannot possibly compete with an entire firm of veterans. There should be moments when the reader fears that Rudy will blow the case on a technicality, or that Trent & Brent will at least suborn a witness or two. There should be moments when the reader wonders whether Donny Ray will really die, or whether leukemia is really the culprit, or whether a bone marrow transplant really would have been effective, not to mention a variety of moments when the reader thinks that maybe the insurance company was right — the procedure wasn’t covered by the policy. Someone at Great Benefit should appear ethical, someone at Trent & Brent noble, someone on Rudy’s side less than saintly. But none of this happens. Grisham writes no sleight-of-hand, permits no ambiguity; The Rainmaker has all the texture of a coat of high- gloss enamel.

What Grisham has done is transcend his genre. He has written a suspense novel without any suspense. And why not? Most of his readers are so familar with the genre’s conventions — the twistings and turnings of plot, the missteps and deceptions — that they have begun to seem false.

Rather than adding interest to a novel, the red herring simply delays gratification. And few of us have the patience for that kind of thing anymore. Time is money, we believe; chases are for cutting to.

John Grisham’s books have captured the spirit of our times no less than the pace.

Yet the question inevitably arises: If the suspense has been eliminated from the suspense novel, why read it? Why not read a horror novel without monsters or a romance without bodice-ripping or a historical epic set in present-day Omaha?

Why not read the Yellow Pages? Consider a sports analogy for the answer. You’re a diehard fan of the Dallas Cowboys. This Sunday they play the hated San Fancisco Forty-Niners for the conference championship and a probable berth in the Super Bowl, and your emotional well-being for the rest of the winter depends on a Dallas victory. You turn on the television. Do you hope for squeaker or a rout?

You want a rout, of course, because a squeaker would stretch your nerves to the breaking point.

You want the Forty-Niners to fumble the opening kickoff and the Cowboys to recover and run the ball into the end zone so quickly that Dallas has seven points on the board before a like number of seconds have ticked off the clock.

You want the score at the end of the first quarter to be so lopsided that it seems the Cowboys” oppo- nent is the junior varsity team at your local high school. Your pas- sion for Dallas is so great that all you care about is results, not art. Of course, you will revel in a Cowboys’ victory under any circumstances, but only a rout will permit you to relax enough to delight in the actu- al experience of spending three- plus hours in front of the TV.

Same with Grisham. His heroes, in the main, are startlingly, implau- sibly good — call them Cowboys.

His villains are cold-bloodedly, unredeemably bad — call them Nin- ers. His readers are impatient. They want virtue to triumph, evil to van- ish. Nuance and the prospect of re- versal mustn’t rear their ugly heads.

And so Grisham defines his characters so starkly that they might be the cast of a morality play, enabling, even forcing, his reading public to take sides early and care far more about ends than means.

In other words, when John Grisham took the suspense out of the suspense novel, he replaced it with the emotional simplicity of a cheering section. For millions of Americans on beaches and air- planes and exercise bicycles, it has been a brilliant substitution. *

Eric Burns is the author of Broadcast Blues.