Word: grisham
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...funny what an appetite we have for this kind of hardcore law-porn. Sure, Michael Clayton did it better, but you still get a buzz off of John Grisham's new book The Associate. The late hours, the fluorescent lights, the vicious competition, the fancy perks, the brilliant minds drowning in gallons of coffee and endless reams of paper. God knows they're not having much fun. But we are. It's a Tom-and-Huck scenario: they paint the fence, while we watch and pretend to get tired. Grisham doesn't try to glamorize it - in fact he works...
...Associate is a tricky balancing act for Grisham, in that there's nobody particularly likable in the mix here. The legal eagles of Scully & Pershing are cynical and joyless. The members of the mysterious organization are villainous to the point of cliché. (They have hairy hands and thin lips and slight accents - those bastards!) Even the possible-rape victim is shrill and self-serving and, well, cynical and joyless. As a result the book hangs on Kyle, and Kyle remains something of a cipher. He's got a kindly divorced father who lives in a small town in Pennsylvania...
...Associate is a bad book. God knows it's not hard to read - with the exception of a miscalculated subplot about one of the frat brothers going to AA, it ticks along lightly and pleasantly - it's crafted and paced with the same signature glossy perfection that makes Grisham, book for book, probably the best-selling novelist in the world. It's just that it's not about anything. In fact it's amazing that anybody could put together a book that is this compulsively readable while at the same time being almost entirely devoid of substance of any kind...
...There's something comforting about the meaningless hindbrain tension that The Associate generates in the reader - empty tension, the kind where there's nothing genuine at stake. Comforting too is the cozy quaintness of Grisham's little world. It's supposed to be a scary place, in theory, full of brooding criminals and impossible choices, but it's really a relic of the American past, one as sentimental and archaic as a Norman Rockwell painting. In a passage that appears, oddly, twice, as dialogue in two different characters' mouths, Grisham attempts to awe us with the high-level security surrounding...
...pictures of John Grisham...