'The Street Lawyer'
by John Grisham
Doubleday, $27.95
"The Street Lawyer," John Grisham's latest in his string of blockbuster lawyer-thrillers, is a disappointing departure from the startling plot twists and cliffhanging suspense that his fans have come to expect.
Perhaps it's an effort to make this new novel more believable, but if that's the case, then the cure is almost worse than the disease: "The Street Lawyer" is so predictable that by 50 pages into it you know what is going to happen - and 300 pages later, it does.
The novel - whose first printing of a staggering 2.8 million copies goes on sale nationwide tomorrow - is narrated by Michael Brock, a promising young attorney in a prestigious Washington, D.C., law firm. In the opening scenes, Brock and several colleagues are taken hostage by a homeless man known as "Mister": he holds them at gunpoint without quite ever demanding ransom or anything in particular, other than the opportunity to berate them for ignoring the poor.
When a police sniper eventually resolves the impasse by putting a bullet through Mister's head, the hostages are freed. But Brock is intrigued by the man's monologue, and he soon discovers that Mister recently had been evicted illegally from makeshift apartments in a warehouse that was planned to be sold, razed and redeveloped. And Brock's firm did the evicting.
His conscience awakened, Brock befriends Mister's lawyer, Mordecai Green, who introduces him to the world of poverty law and homeless shelters. Before he knows it, Brock is making peanut-butter sandwiches in the shelter, helping homeless clients fight for benefits and meeting real people in hard places.
At one point, he talks with a family with several children, feeding the small boy cookies and helping calm the crying baby at night. Several days later, the entire family is found dead, asphyxiated in their car while trying to stay warm in a snowstorm. When they, too, turn out to have been illegally evicted from the same apartments, Brock quits his job and joins Green fighting for the little guys.
On his way out of his firm, he takes a crucial file relating to the eviction, setting up the primary conflict for the rest of the book. The firm tries everything to get the file back, and Brock tries to use it to sue the development company and their lawyers - his former employers.
This is pretty tough material to forge into a gripping potboiler: two groups of lawyers fighting over a file. No one is shot, few are threatened, and - coming as it does when must-see TV is All Monica All the Time - even the legal maneuverings seem pretty tepid.
Nor does Grisham use the novel to explore the underlying values that are being either violated or protected by his legal protagonists. A casual reader would be hard-pressed to understand why it was so wrong to take the file in the first place, much less the responsibilities a lawyer owes his client - here violated not only by Brock in taking the file and using it to sue his old firm's client but also by his former partner, who allowed the illegal eviction to occur.
Sadly, "The Street Lawyer" only glances off the surface of this dispute, relying instead on the tired Good Guy-Bad Guy motif to carry the reader's attention to the end. And even on that level there isn't much excitement: The climax is a settlement conference between the parties. You try making that exciting.
Indeed, the biggest surprise in the novel is its lack of one. From the end of the opening scene, it is relatively clear what is going to happen: The eviction of Mister will turn out to be wrongful; the firm will be the heavy; and Brock will be the hero. Grisham seems devoted to preaching about homelessness, just as some of his earlier books took on big law firms, big insurance companies and big tobacco companies.
To his credit, Grisham does move the plot along, never a problem in his fiction, and here he adds depth to his central character. Brock's wife leaves him, he makes mistakes and regrets them, he even reveals a human side on occasion. That alone is an improvement over much of Grisham's earlier fiction.
Yet those earlier works - like them or not - at least offered suspenseful entertainment. With that stripped away, there isn't much left here but a thinly predictable plot and a barely concealed lecture on homelessness. You don't know whether to applaud that Grisham seems to be trying to make his novels into something more than literary pop-tarts, or cry that the end result is much less.
