This appeared way back when on Splice Today.
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It’s been years since I read a John Grisham novel, but the first chapter of The Confession took me back to that time when I swore never to read another Grisham title. From clichés like, “It had been so long since he had touched a woman,” to fumbled metaphors like, “Her interest in the inquiry had suddenly lost steam,” the prose has the painfully flaccid zip of Raymond Chandler lobotomized with a Wal-Mart weed whacker.
The story is simple yet leaden, and Grisham pushes against it with a mammoth obliviousness. Some random guy staggers into the church reception room and the hot receptionist/pastor’s wife asks him for information and then he explains his name is Travis Boyette and he’s an ex-con and you can almost hear Grisham chuckling at his own cleverness because he’s gotten all that information out there in the course of the narrative itself without having to write explication and that must mean he’s a damn fine writer, right? And shortly thereafter he proves he’s an even better writer because…brain cancer! Boyette’s got it—but he doesn’t show any sign of pain till right after he tells us he has brain cancer because if he said he had a headache earlier it would tip us off.
You can probably see where this is going. No doubt you’ve already intuited not only the existence but also the main character traits of Keith the pastor, who “spent much of his time listening to the delicate problems of others, and offering advice to others” and had therefore “become a wise and astute observer.” Probably you’ve also guessed that Boyette is a bad, bad person (did you figure out he was a sex offender from the fact that he looks at the pastor’s wife’s chest? You did? Bonus points!) If you’re especially perspicacious you may even be able to reconstruct from TV movies past the hollow schlop-schlop of pop theology and pop psychology flopping about like two half-dead fish in a bucket. “It’s human nature. When faced with our own mortality, we think about the afterlife. What about you, Travis? Do you believe in God?”
Travis sort of does and sort of doesn’t, phrasing his concerns in the unforgettably colorless argot of a criminal trapped in a PG-13-rated book written by an author who has, apparently, never seen an R-rated film, much less The Wire. “Damned headaches,” Boyette mutters, because that’s just the kind of filth you expect from career sex offenders. In moments of great stress, he has even been known to resort to a double negative.
From such sure signs we know that Boyette is indeed the worst of the worst. Still, the remorseless demands of plot insist that he feel remorse, and he drops hints that he can clear the name of an innocent on death row. Keith and his wife join hands and turn their faces towards the thick remainder of the book. They are hopeful and unafraid, for they are vacuous imbeciles…and besides, they only have to live it, not read it.
Can’t really see the point of digging up this piece. Grisham’s produced half a dozen books since and bad reviews still give him no more than a tear or two en route to the bank. The criticism that his books are predictable isn’t damaging because his books aren’t meant to be surprising.
Eh, I just thought the review was funny. If you don’t like it, fair enough; there’ll be something else tomorrow….
What I dislike in Grisham isn’t the crap prose; I’m a big consumer of crap prose in pop blockbusters, no sweat.
What I find unforgivable is that, even in the narrow requirements of his genre, he can’t plot! His books don’t end, they just stop. (Same reproach I had for the late James ‘Shogun’ Clavell).
Grisham’s heroes tend to start winning, then keep on winning, until they’ve won. Adversaries are incompetent doofuses ( see ‘The Firm’ or ‘The Client’).
BTW, I’ve always liked Francis Ford Coppola’s take on Grisham, whose ‘A Time to Kill’ he adapted for the flicks:
“That son of a bitch. He’s rich, he’s handsome, he’s successful…”
Then, after a moment’s thought, Coppola brightened:
“Yeah — but he’s not Italian!”
Speaking of Italian…The only Grisham book I ever read was Playing for Pizza. It was lying around at a cousin’s house I had retreated to. It’s a tale of a washed-up pro quarterback trying to redeem himself playing American football in a semi-pro league in Europe — good, light escapism, if you ever need to kill a rainy day.
“the painfully flaccid zip of Raymond Chandler lobotomized with a Wal-Mart weed whacker.”
That line alone justifies republishing this.
I think Grisham and other popular writers on his level are in a very desirable position, not so much because they make money as because they fly under the radar of pop-cultural analysis.
Sort of depends on who you are? 50 Shades got lots of analysis; so did Twilight. Grisham seems to escape it. May be benefit of being crappy pop lit for guys.
I’m not sure how big a part gender plays in the uneven distribution of attention here. You could argue that 50 Shades and Twilight got the analytical attention they did in part because they did something remotely interesting or new in terms of thematic and conceptual frameworks, however inept the works were in most other respects. Even if the tropes weren’t new in themselves, the wide success that those specific stories were met with was surprising in terms of how said frameworks are usually received. Sort of like how Harry Potter or Battlestar Galactica were all the rage in critical and academic circles a few years earlier.
People like Grisham seem to embody the unending repetitiveness and complete predictability of the worst types of suspense fiction. Their commercial success is anything but surprising and the formulaic nature of them is what makes them known quantity for consumers, publishers, and utterly uninteresting for (most) critical analysis. That said, I did find this review very funny, so thanks for sharing it, Noah!
The media is always ready to blow up something that looks like a trend among young or youngish women, for reasons not unconnected with relieving them of their disposable income. But 50 Shades and Twilight’s many imitators haven’t got anything like the same attention, and by and large don’t need it.
Ugh, this gives me painful flashbacks to high school, when I read a bunch of his books in short order – The Firm, The Client, the Advocate … That he’s no longer writing about heroic lawyers is actually a step in the right direction.
When I pick up a Grisham book I know I am in for an entertaining read.. I will buy every book he writes.