Grisham Formula In A String Of Riveting Legal Thrillers, John Grisham’s ‘The Rainmaker’ Is A Washout

“The Rainmaker” By John Grisham (Doubleday, $25.95, 434 pages)

Let’s make this clear right away: If “The Rainmaker” had been John Grisham’s first novel, chances are there wouldn’t have been a second.

Grisham, the man who has made a cottage industry out of writing legal thrillers, has just seen publication of his sixth novel. And the verdict from this jury is that the man is starting to coast.

Think back on the plots of his first five books:

“A Time to Kill”: A small-town lawyer defends a black man accused of murdering the white thugs who raped his daughter.

“The Firm”: A just-graduated law student gets hired by a well-heeled firm only to find that it is a mafia front.

“The Pelican Brief”: A law student stumbles onto a conspiracy involving the murder of two U.S. Supreme Court justices.

“The Client”: A struggling lawyer takes the case of a boy who, having witnessed a man’s suicide, gets caught in the crossfire between an ambitious U.S. attorney and a gang of killers the attorney wants to prosecute.

“The Chamber”: A just-graduated law student takes a job defending his grandfather who, long ago convicted of a brutal bombing murder, is about to be executed.

And “The Rainmaker”? Well, it is the exciting adventure of a just-graduated law student who sues an insurance company for denying a medical claim.

What is wrong with this picture?

To amplify, Rudy Baylor is just about to graduate from Memphis State Law School. The kind of guy who has had to work his way through all three years, Rudy finds himself both miserable (his girl dropped him, he’s on the verge of bankruptcy) and pleased (he’s about to begin a job at a small but respectable firm).

But stuff happens, as they say. And suddenly Rudy finds himself hustling for any available work. He stumbles onto a case that essentially involves insurance fraud, in which a company has denied one of its clients a valid claim for cancer treatment, and Rudy tries to use the case as a means of getting another position.

(In legal parlance, apparently, a “rainmaker” is a person who attracts profitable cases. Grisham seems to be using the term largely for ironic purposes.)

Ultimately, though, it is Rudy who must try the case. And, what a coincidence, Rudy’s opponent in court just happens to be the very firm that ruined his smooth transition from student to actual attorney.

So what happens? If you’ve read any of Grisham’s other books, you can guess easily enough.

If mere subject matter were the only problem with “The Rainmaker,” however, Grisham could be excused. Even Charles Dickens stumbled now and then. Unfortunately, though, the novel has a number of other faults.

Let’s start with style. Grisham has, for some strange reason, resorted in this novel to writing in first-person, present tense. As in, “I arrive early for my nine o’clock appointment with Dr. Walter Kord. A lot of good it does. I wait for an hour, reading Donny Ray’s medical records, which I’ve already memorized. The waiting room fills with cancer patients. I try not to look at them.”

The problem is clear: Never a poet, Grisham has now abrogated any attempt whatsoever to create rich prose. “The Rainmaker” reads more like a daily diary of passing events than a bonafide story starring reality-based characters. It has moments, but they are rare - not to mention, in some cases, hundreds of pages apart.

That passage does, however, include one of Grisham’s pet practices: using his books as a means of venting rage. Never a fan of the law or lawyers, Grisham, who is an attorney himself, has in every book exposed the more sleazy aspects of his profession. In “The Rainmaker,” he not only continues that practice but also adds complaints about doctors, insurance claims agents, multinational corporations, abusive husbands, greedy families, racists and other bully types. The list of Grisham’s gripes seems endless.

Normally, this works in his favor. One of the most interesting aspects of Grisham’s previous work has been his impassioned protests against the injustices we all face on a semiregular basis. To his credit, too, Grisham occasionally immerses his characters in predicaments that most of us never have the misfortune to experience personally. “The Chamber,” for instance, is a diatribe against capital punishment.

But “The Rainmaker” reads more like one long litany of bellyaching. Instead of creating an overall, complex framework in which his characters struggle to find their lives, Grisham gives us only a straightforward, linear plotline dealing with Rudy’s fluctuating fortunes. The few subplots that involve his former employers, current partners and eccentric landlords end up going nowhere, leaving us to wonder why Grisham devoted so much attention to them.

And the one subplot involving romance is about as believable as one of Grisham’s injury-claims attorneys suddenly developing a conscience.

In its portrayal of the legal profession, “The Rainmaker” amounts to a symphony of whines in which Grisham’s theories of justice - which, typically, are suspiciously vigilante - prevail in an all-too familiar way.

For along with everything else wrong with the book, “The Rainmaker” offers nothing we haven’t read before. The Grisham formula is showing wear.

Rudy Baylor, the struggling protagonist, is not all that different from Mitch McDeere (“The Firm”) or Darby Shaw (“The Pelican Brief”) or even Reggie Love (“The Client”). He’s an inexperienced attorney facing powerful foes. He looks into the face of the law and, while recoiling in disgust, beats it at its own game. Sadder but wiser, he drives off into the sunset.

Maybe it’s time for Grisham, modern publishing’s favorite cash cow, to do the same.