Grisham’s Newest Tackles Homelessness
“The Street Lawyer” by John Grisham (Doubleday. $27.95. 348 pages)
John Grisham again surfaces, sure as the groundhog, the first week in February.
His ninth novel, “The Street Lawyer” - 2.8 million copies of which hit stores Wednesday - promises springlike economic weather for the publishing business. Still, the book is as chilly as winter.
In a bit of a departure from novels past, “The Street Lawyer” takes up homelessness, far more divisive a cause than crusading against tobacco or insurance companies. One early review aptly compares this work to Dickens - who, like Grisham, keeps readers turning pages as he wields a social cudgel.
Michael Brock, 32, is a workaholic who makes well over $100,000 a year and who is on the fast track at a D.C. law firm, Drake & Sweeney. He is among the lawyers taken hostage by Mister, a homeless man, in the company’s swank offices. After Michael escapes being blown to kingdom come, he experiences a life-altering epiphany. Within a week, he resigns his job, ends his loveless and childless marriage and goes to work in a legal clinic for $30,000 a year.
He also “borrows” a file from his firm, a file that will prove that Drake & Sweeney illegally evicted a homeless family into winter blizzards and disaster. On his way to copy the file, Michael’s Lexus is totaled and his life nearly so.
But the trials of one riches-to-relative-rags lawyer dim by comparison with those of the street people. This book is about their addictions, their hopelessness, their grit, the sweeps of their gathering spots. Michael himself pales as a character beside the legal clinic’s activist Mordecai Green.
Grisham’s newest protagonist is a far cry from the unprincipled Patrick Lanigan, who in “The Partner” (presently atop the paperback best-seller list) stages his own death to steal $90 million from his ruthless firm. In “The Street Lawyer,” the novelist takes his biggest chance yet. Not only does he ratchet the tension down a notch, but he pits social justice issues against the lifestyles of his middle-class readers, some of whom may squirm at the questions the novel raises. Can we afford our Lexuses and save our souls, too?
Thankfully for bookstores, we can afford our Grisham novels. In the 357 weeks since “The Firm” hit bookstores in 1991, a Grisham hardcover has been on its best-seller list for 236 weeks, Publishers Weekly reports. The question is whether the usual millions will embrace this one. It might be that we read Grisham not for his saints but his sinners.