Word: kindness
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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...
...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. When you read Michael Crichton or Scott Turow, their books wrestle with actual issues - the dangers of technology, the agonizing ambiguities of legal decision-making, what to do with underwater alien spheres, etc. The Associate is as close to being about nothing as a book can be - it's a masterpiece...
...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...
...allegations in the post, titled "What Kind of Communist Is Mr. Chen Hua?," could very well be false; there has been no official response. Calls to the Beijing Municipal Government's press office were not answered Friday afternoon...
...element with which they make a simple astrological connection to money. A metal year, they say, brings plenty of gold. An earth year buries all that lucre under piles of dirt. All in all, a buffalo wallowing in mud doesn't exactly portend a get-up-and-go kind of year...