JOHN GRISHAM sometimes seems less a literary personality than a force of nature -- his books a showy kind of regularly reoccurring natural phenomenon, a sort of Halley's comet between hard covers.
People who keep track of such things report that Grisham was the bestselling author of the 1990s, when readers bought more than 60 million of his books. He belongs to an elite group of authors who have sold out first printings of 2 million volumes. Grisham remains the only author to have written a novel that topped the bestseller lists for seven consecutive years.
In the world of popular fiction, those sorts of numbers not only put you beyond the reach of conventional criticism, but they also obscure any purpose but brute commerce. That's a shame in Grisham's case, because no other writer of his popularity is quite so keen-eyed or as fierce a social critic. He's an idealist but not an optimist; a moralist but not a moralizer.
"The Appeal" is his 20th novel, and it's as angry, dark and urgent a piece of social realism as you're likely to find on the bestseller lists any time soon. Further, in this presidential election year, it's a far more blunt, accurate and plain-spoken indictment of our contemporary political system's real failings than you're likely to find anywhere on the nonfiction lists.
Grisham has set himself an interesting task in "The Appeal" -- to simultaneously explore the malevolent influence of moneyed special interests on our electoral system and to rehabilitate the social standing of trial lawyers. The latter may prove a tougher sell than the former. Big business and its allies in the Republican Party have spent decades so successfully vilifying "trial lawyers" as legal vultures and social parasites that the two words virtually have become an epithet. Witness the sniping at Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, a millworker's son who earned much of his considerable personal fortune trying horrific medical malpractice cases. The fact that nearly every dollar in a trial lawyer's wallet came from obtaining injured individuals the justice they otherwise would have been denied by our system is somehow lost in all the derisive hooting about expensive haircuts.
Not on Grisham, part of whose purpose here is to remind his readers that the trial lawyer's contingency fee is the poor man's key to the courthouse -- usually the only one.
