Book Review: ‘Appeal’ intriguing look at political system’s failings
“The Appeal: A Novel”
by John Grisham (Doubleday, 358 pages, $27.95)
John Grisham sometimes seems less a literary personality than a force of nature, his books a showy kind of reccurring natural phenomenon – a sort of Halley’s comet between hard covers.
Grisham, the top-selling novelist of the 1990s, remains the only author to have written a novel that topped the best-seller lists for seven consecutive years.
In the world of popular fiction, those sorts of numbers not only put you beyond the reach of conventional criticism, but also obscure any purpose but brute commerce.
That’s a shame in Grisham’s case, because no other writer of his popularity is quite so keen-eyed or as fierce a social critic. He’s an idealist but not an optimist; a moralist but not a moralizer.
“The Appeal” is his 20th novel, and it’s as angry, dark and urgent a piece of social realism as you’re likely to find on the best-seller lists any time soon.
Further, in this presidential election year, it’s a far more blunt, accurate and plain-spoken indictment of our contemporary political system’s real failings than you’re likely to find anywhere on the nonfiction lists.
Grisham sets his story in territory he knows well: rural and small-town Mississippi, where he once practiced law and served as a Democratic representative in the state Legislature.
In this case, the setting is a community outside Hattiesburg, where the Krane Chemical plant has been dumping carcinogenic chemicals into the water table for years and lying about it. The water is so toxic that it turns the local baseball diamond brown, and in household after household, people die of cancer.
It’s a cluster of disease so striking that a national magazine dubs the area “Cancer County USA.” Krane, however, produces expert after bought-and-paid-for expert to assert that there’s nothing wrong with water so fetid that people no longer use it even to wash.
Finally, a local husband-and-wife law firm – Wes and Mary Grace Payton – takes the case of a widow who has lost both husband and son to the toxic waste coming out of the tap.
The Paytons wager everything, including their home, to finance the case. By the time a jury finds in their client’s favor and awards her $41 million, the couple are living with their two children in a run-down apartment and eating macaroni and cheese for dinner.
The verdict represents not only justice for their client but also the fee that will put them back on their feet. There is, however, still the matter of the company’s inevitable appeal.
Krane’s biggest stockholder, predatory New York billionaire Carl Trudeau, promises his colleagues that “not one dime of our hard-earned profits will ever get into the hands of those trailer park peasants.”
Why risk an appeal, he’s advised by a corrupt senator, when he can stack the judicial deck? Political consultants propose targeting a swing-voting justice in the next election and replacing her with a hand-picked, ideologically reliable jurist.
Her opponent coasts to victory, and then fate intervenes: His son is left permanently impaired by a defective product and a medical error. It’s a transformative experience, but is it enough to overcome the ideology and the political alliances that put him on the court?
It’s a fascinating narrative, filled with deadly accurate characterizations by an author who knows both the law and politics from the inside.
The problem, as with all Grisham’s fiction, is that it’s egregiously written. Characters arrive as if spawned from the head of Zeus, fully formed and unchanged by anything that transpires in the course of the story’s unfolding, and the plot clanks from point to point.