Distraction

I’ve been chipping away at reading Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Yes, still chipping. My bookmark looks to be working its way between the one-third and halfway point of the book. It is a lot of pages, but considering I have never encountered a book before with print as small as it is I can’t really compare my progress to anything else I have read. Consequently I was beginning to lose faith in my reading abilities. I’m known as a thorough reader*, if not a fast one, so time to the finish line is a sensitive point to me.

So I made a decision.

I decided to insert a novel into the middle of my study of the Third Reich. I picked The Firm by John Grisham. I’d never read it before and it had been a long time since I read anything by him. Apparently the years I have spent writing and studying other writer’s work increased my senses to some finer points of style that I will examine on hereafter.



The first thing I noticed was that the prose was weak. I understand that is one of his early works, but I still found myself thinking of his backlist and considering Grisham as the Louis L’Amour of legal thrillers. Maybe he got better. It really has no bearing on my examination except as an insight to how my analytical skills have changed over the years.

In The Firm the characters are all static and flat. I understand that there are different terms out there and when I say static I mean that there is no character growth (the beach scene isn’t what I’m talking about) and they all have the liveliness of one of those Build Your Character sheets inserted into the text of the story. The only person in the story who inspired any emotion from me was Abby, and it was because she was married to an ingenious chump, not because Grisham wasted anytime making her a person. So it is obvious that The Firm isn’t a character story.

So why did I burn through it in less than a week? It had me on the edge of my seat. Grisham created a lot of tension. I suspect that he reverse engineered his story the way a lot of mystery writers do; he came up with how the ending would go and then worked out what would have to happen for to get there and inserted tidbits throughout the story in a way that defied notice or left the reader wondering how that was going to come into play. I wonder if he deviated at all from his outline.

It always impresses me how many different ways there are to make it as a writer. For all that The Firm kept me riveted while I read; I left it without connecting with a single character and that is rare for me. I apparently lean towards character-driven works. I was also disappointed with the end. Mitch manages to get away with everything on account of his being “smarter than [everyone else]” and Abby loses her family and ends up on the run with Captain Fidelity. Based on the bittersweet endings of some other Grisham books that I vaguely remember I suppose that it could have been meant as an ironic ending, but I expected more from the protagonist and he didn’t have it to give. Maybe Grisham was making a point about expectations.

R.