‘The Street Lawyer’: From Avarice to Virtue

Michiko Kakutani

Tuesday, Feb. 10, 1998 | 9:03 a.m.

John Grisham clearly isn't one of the more talented writers around, but he's certainly one of the luckiest.

Indeed, his timing has been impeccable. In the nine years since he began cranking out legal thrillers, court cases have become a national obsession, ratified and fed by a horde of celebrity lawyers offering predictions, commentary and play by play on everything from O.J. Simpson and the Menendez brothers to Whitewater and Sexgate. It's not just that viewers of CNN's "Burden of Proof" and Court TV are familiar with legal lingo and procedure; it's also that in our adversarial culture, court cases have become a paradigm of how we grapple with the world.

Those same nine years have also seen the acceleration of several other phenomena that have guaranteed writers like Grisham even more money and fame: the globalization of American culture; the efflorescence of the superstore and its showcasing of brand-name books, and Hollywood's insatiable appetite for formulaic thrillers. No wonder Doubleday has printed 2.5 million copies of Grisham's latest novel, "The Street Lawyer."

Not surprisingly, "The Street Lawyer" follows a familiar Grisham recipe: cast a young, idealistic lawyer as the underdog and pit him against a big, powerful opponent with money and resources to spare; construct a fast, relentless plot line that moves ahead like a hungry (if very nearsighted) shark, and toss in some topical social issues to give the whole thing a veneer of relevance.

One problem with this stilted, jerry-built novel is that Grisham has never been particularly good at creating characters with any real emotional depth, and in "The Street Lawyer," he's chosen to tell a story that's more character-driven than ever before. In fact, the better part of the novel concerns the midlife crisis of its hero, Michael Brock, and his evolution from selfish, money-grubbing yuppie to selfless advocate for the poor.

What happens to Michael is this: Two pages into the novel, a crazed homeless man called Mister enters the marbled hallways of Drake & Sweeney, the prestigious Washington law firm where Michael is an up-and-coming lawyer, and starts firing a gun. He quickly takes nine lawyers hostage, threatening to blow them all away with what looks like homemade explosives. He hectors them about their fancy salaries and complains that they do nothing for the homeless.

Though the crisis ends quickly enough, Michael is unable to go on with his life. In fact, Grisham would have us believe that Mister's jeremiad about homelessness has induced a sudden change of heart in Michael, that it has made him want to abandon the fast-track corporate life and go into public-interest law.

After a homeless family dies during a snowstorm, Michael takes up their cause with a vengeance: he's soon stolen a secret file from Drake & Sweeney (dealing with the family's illegal eviction from a building that's about to be sold), and like so many Grisham characters before him, he's on the run from his foes.

Because Grisham gives us no insight into Michael's emotional makeup, because he defines him purely through externals - what he wears, what he drives, what he earns - he is unable to make his transformation from well-heeled yuppie to penniless advocate of the homeless the least bit understandable or authentic. As in previous Grisham novels, there is no subtlety or nuance to Michael's story: Grisham's lawyerly (even Manichean) outlook leads him to depict everyone and every action as positive or negative, idealistic or venal, good or evil.

To make matters worse, Michael emerges as a particularly unsympathetic hero: sanctimonious, self-dramatizing and willfully adolescent. This is a man who thinks that his new dedication to the homeless has made him a saint, but who worries that his shiny new Lexus will be stolen while he's ministering to the poor. This is a man who starts sleeping in a sleeping bag on the floor so he can better identify with his new clients, but who continually wonders whether he should pack a gun when he goes into a bad section of town. Somehow you can't imagine Tom Cruise or Matthew McConaughey wanting to play this guy.

Matters are not helped by Grisham's atrocious dialogue. Michael speaks almost entirely in cliches: he talks about being "back at full throttle" and being his "usual hard-charging self." To a friend, he says he's "found a calling"; to his brother, he says: "I've lost my love for money. It's the curse of the devil." The rest of the people in this book speak in equally leaden terms. One says, "The law is a higher calling." Another: "There are more valleys than mountains."

As for Grisham's much-vaunted storytelling skills, they are little in evidence in this novel. Yes, he does keep the plot lines unfurling, but he's like one of those circus clowns, pulling scarfs, rabbits and eggs out of his pockets at random.

Whenever the story seems in danger of slowing down, he contrives a new flurry of events: a mysterious file from an anonymous informant that appears on Michael's desk; a violent car accident that sends Michael to the hospital; a conveniently timed newspaper article that helps Michael's cause; the abrupt separation of Michael and his wife.

Within a month, Michael has completely changed his life. He's quit one job and taken another; moved from a cushy Georgetown apartment into a barren little flat; broken up with his wife and found a new girlfriend; been arrested and put in jail, and found meaning in his life. Along the way, there is lots of pseudo-detective work, lots of legal wrangling and a big showdown with his former employer.

Grisham is too busy charging ahead to bother fleshing out any of these developments with the sort of emotional or physical detail that might make them feel plausible or real. The result is a perfunctory brand-name novel with an unlikable hero, a slapdash plot and some truly awful prose.

Although "The Street Lawyer" will doubtless leap to the top of the best-seller lists, the reader in search of real courtroom drama would be better off turning on CNN or Court TV.

PUBLICATION NOTES:

THE STREET LAWYER

By John Grisham

348 pages. Doubleday. $27.95.