The King Of Torts

THE KING OF TORTS by John Grisham

Before he became one of the world's best selling authors, John Grisham was a lawyer. He has used that background in most of his stories but never has he seemed as much an anti-lawyer as he is in his newest book THE KING OF TORTS. In this book the only good lawyer is an unemployed one, and the worst of the kind is the most successful one.

Clay Carter starts out as a very poor lawyer, at least money wise he is. He makes his living as a member of the Office of the Public Defender in Washington, DC. As such he has one dreary case after another. The only bright spot in his life is his girlfriend, Rebecca Van Horne. Still there are drawbacks even to that relationship. She has two parents who detest him, almost as much as he detests them.

Things change for Clay when he gets a mysterious offer to represent a class of defendants against a drug manufacturer. Clay accepts the offer, quits his job, and starts his own law firm. In a short while he is richer than his wildest dreams. It is at this point that Clay's life and the book both begin to go downhill.

Grisham is so obsessed with giving details of how money and power corrupt that he forgets the characters in his story. It is just page after page of descriptions of living the high life and how mind-boggling it can be. His point about greed is made over and over and over again.

It is also a flaw of the book that it gives you no one to like. Most readers want a hero of some sort to make them feel better about life or about the world in general. In THE KING OF TORTS you just get one loser after another - moral loser that is. A half-hearted effort to redeem Clay is not really successful.

When you think back on Grisham's first novels you remember how good he was with plots and characters. Novels such as A TIME TO KILL and THE FIRM were full of heroic persons who stood up against evil and triumphed. Now we get books like THE KING OF TORTS where the full story is based on one diatribe against the legal profession after another.

Grisham's latest is a readable story but not an enjoyable one. If he continues this path he might be forced to go back to practicing law in order to make a living. And feeling about the practice of law as he does, this would be an awful sentence to fulfill.

THE KING OF TORTS is published by Doubleday and Company. It contains 372 pages and sells for $27.95.