“Run” by Douglas E. Winter

winter

By Ray Sawhill

Has Mike Hammer seen the light and joined Al Gore’s staff?
Douglas E. Winter’s first novel is an example of what might be thought of as a micro-subgenre: the hard-boiled, apocalyptic thriller with a liberal agenda. It’s a condemnation of what Winter clearly sees as America’s insanely permissive laws concerning firearms.

Burdon Lane, his protagonist, is a middle-level errand-runner for a shady gun operation in Washington. Valued for his toughness and ability to keep a low profile, he’s part of a team making a huge delivery of weaponry to a New York City street gang. Things, from Lane’s point of view at least, rapidly start to go wrong.

Winter shows an amusing ability to turn descriptions of firearms into demented arias, and a talent for cooking up interlocking conspiracies. He may be optimistic about the number of times all hell should break loose in the course of a single thriller, and he may also have misjudged how many bitterly ironic cracks about ”the American dream” his book needed.

But what makes the novel a chore to get through is the ”Natural Born Killers” manner in which he has told his story; hyped-up and full of hallucinatory effects, the voice seems electronically processed rather than written. Even granting that he’s making a point, most readers will want to ask this of Winter and his publisher: Has there ever been a person who, when in the mood for a video-game-style nerve jangling, has reached for a novel instead? If there is such a person, this is the book for him.

© Ray Sawhill 2001. First appeared in The New York Times Book Review Section.

“Fair and Tender Ladies” by Lee Smith

lee smith

By Ray Sawhill

Lee Smith’s novels are as consciously “women’s fiction” as anything you might run across in Redbook or McCall’s, but she opens the genre up and makes it seem expansive. Her work has a mixture of lyricism and sexual boldness that makes you go outside of writing, to the work of actresses and women singers, for comparisons. Like Sissy Spacek and Loretta Lynn, Smith can make a performance in a popular medium seem like a complete declaration of feeling.

Her new novel, “Fair and Tender Ladies” (Putnam), consists of letters written by Ivy Rowe, the daughter of a Virginia mountain family, who lives from 1900 well into the ’70s. Ivy’s life is the stuff of a back-country soap opera. When her father dies, her mother takes the family to town; when her mother dies, she boards with a sister who drinks on the sly. Ivy gets pregnant by a boy who leaves to fight in World War I, has an affair with a rich kid, marries a childhood friend, and returns with him to the family farm to raise a passel of kids.

Although Smith’s choice of the epistolary form might lead you to expect a play of irony and distance, the book contains no satire or parody. The author is in closer sympathy with her protagonist than we’re used to in contemporary literary fiction, and the point of the book is how far into Ivy’s emotions Smith can take us. That’s pretty far. Ivy’s letters, when she’s a child, keep shading into bookish extravagance; her words are all needlepoint and ribbons. In adolescence, she’s fascinated by being loved and desired, and by loving and desiring, and she acquires a reputation as a fallen woman even as she sees herself as the heroine of a romance novel.

A number of the letters she writes are to a mentally handicapped sister: in them, Ivy confides feelings she tells no one else about. These words stream out of her like feathers, clouds. She writes her sister about a hallucination she had the day she discovered she was pregnant: “I could see that baby as clear as day, tiny and pink and all curled up, and then it started beating me with its little fists against my stomach, trying to escape. It hurt me. And then … I was that little baby caught inside my own self and dying to escape. But I could not. I could never get out, I was caught for ever and ever inside myself.” By old age, facing down the coal company with a shotgun by her side, Ivy has become an eccentric buzzard and her words have grown crabbed and spiky. But her feelings still transport her; she still has the avidity of a little girl.

“I didn’t care if he was lying or not,” she writes her sister about a sweet-talker she once left her children and husband behind for. “It seemed like years since I’d heard a story.” Smith brings a more wide-ranging awareness to her tastes than Ivy does, but she shares Ivy’s susceptibility to storytelling. She reacts to stories as many people react to favorite songs, and she fills the novel with legends and tales. Smith’s love for the Appalachian hills gives off vibrations. She makes a reader feel the presence of spirits; she still sees in the land what folk artists saw there. Her work is about the moment when, as you look at or listen to a work of naïve art, it stops being a curiosity and starts to speak to you in a human voice.

It’s these longer, darker rhythms, pulsing beneath the hillbilly-Victorian flowerets of Ivy’s voice, that give the novel its physicality, and that help create the illusion of coming into warm contact with lives that have always seemed to take place at an impassable distance. “Fair and Tender Ladies” might have been sung into being.

© 1988 by Newsweek, Inc. Reproduced by permission.

“The Client” by John Grisham

grisham

By Ray Sawhill

Reading the bestselling novels of the young ex-lawyer John Grisham is like being privy to the conversations ambitious middle-Americans have with themselves. I’ve never read any fiction, including porn, romance novels and comic books, that’s so completely unself-aware, and I’ve never read a writer who’s less aware of his effects. He’s the Dan Quayle of novelists. His books are strangers to such concerns as shape, theme, character, and form; there’s nothing in them to wrestle with in the way of meaning.

It’s fiction for people who don’t normally read fiction by a guy who isn’t much drawn to it himself, except as a business proposition — as an effort to score a bonanza. But the books don’t seem to be experienced as cynical by his fans. (Is it because they too understand the world largely as a mass of business propositions?) His novels are for and of a world where making it is everything. Reading them is a little like watching game shows, except his novels are for people with college educations rather than working-class people. Grisham offers a little suspense, a little sexual temptation, and some money-and-job details to relate to.

The guy isn’t a genre craftsman, and the books aren’t exactly formula novels. At the same time, these suspense novels are an entertaining treasure trove of unwitting Dadaism. But where Dada was European and sophisticated, this is homegrown and inadvertent. The Dadaists were conscious artists purveying an idea of the unconscious. Grisham’s books are the unconscious. They don’t exactly express the ambivalent feelings many Americans have towards sophistication, but those feelings are certainly in them.

Grisham’s novels — he has written four so far and more than 19 million copies are in print — are full of scrambled syntax and crazy names, but there’s nothing of the puzzle-maker about him as a writer, and there’s nothing in the books that’s meant to be broken down or analyzed. Relationships dart in and out of the narrative frame in a way that, without meaning to, recalls Queneau. “Klickman was a meathead with little finesse,” the narrator of Grisham’s new novel “The Client” (Doubleday) tells us. Two pages later, the main character, an 11-year-old boy, apparently struck by what a great word choice the narrator made, begins a lecture to Klickman (a cop) this way: “Let me tell you something, meathead.” Within another couple of pages, the narrator, evidently pleased the 11-year-old enjoyed the word “meathead,” takes to calling the cop “Meathead Klickman.”

Listen to the Grisham narrator:

  • “Mo had at least four guns either on him or within reach.”
  • “He paced around the office as if in deep thought.”
  • “His screaming lungs were almost audible.”
  • “At some point, about halfway to the jet, Mark stopped.”

Sentences like these can really get you thinking: If the narrator doesn’t know, who does?

The idioms the narrator uses often seem to come from Mars. One character “cracks his window so he could breathe.” Another “cuts his eyes in all directions.” A singer in a black church opens her “vast mouth” and out flows “a deep, rich, mellow river of glorious a capella.”

At times you find yourself wondering if Grisham is trying to compete with Lewis Carroll:

“The name’s Reggie, okay.”

“Sure, Reggie. Listen, K.O. just brought me up to date.”

Even allowing for some attempts at comic characterization and for how eccentric names can be in the south, Grisham has the most topsy-turvy ear for character names imaginable. Nearly all are like something S.J. Perelman invented for a Marx Brothers movie: Cat Bruster, L. Winston Lotterhouse, Gavin Verheek, Gray Grantham, Fletcher Coal, Denton Voyles, Eric East, Clint Van Hooser, Smith Keen, Hinky Myrick, Mason Paypur, Willis Upchurch, Paul Gronke, Emmitt Waycross, Norma Thrash, Link Dole, Dr. Wilbert Rodeheaver.

In “The Client,” Grisham outdoes even himself in the name department, showing a completely inexplicable fondness for names with repeating letters: Boyd Boyette, Roy Foltrigg, Reggie Love, Penny Patoula, Chester Tanfill, Walter Deeble, Slick (Mole) Moeller, Marcia Riggle, Omar Noose. In a virtuoso touch, a few characters win names with double sets of double letters: Wally Boxx, Barry Muldanno, Skipper Scherff.

When a couple of thugs hole up at a Radisson Hotel, it certainly seems like the right place for them. And when you learn that the lead character adores pizza, you’re relieved — it’s the right food for him. If you look for a Nabokovian pattern of linguistic playfulness here, you won’t find one. You end up wondering: is this a tick that comes from Grisham’s years in Mississippi and Tennessee? The names contribute to sentences that really leave you cross-eyed: “He had an escort of sorts with Wally and Fink and agents Trumann and Scherff.”

When Grisham sets out to provide detail and atmosphere, what he achieves goes past the Hemingwayesque into pure corporate-speak. “The lights were bright and the carpet was clean.” “A minister of some generic faith appeared.” “His voice was loud, yet warm. His words were educated, yet colloquial.” “Deacons danced. Elders chanted. Women fainted.”

Reading his novels all at once, you turn up gems for the auteurists. Why, in three of the four novels, is there a black character — always a different one — whose first name is Roosevelt? In “The Client,” as in his other books, Grisham seems drawn to backsides: “Slow on his ass”; “He shifted his wide ass”; “Wally perched his tiny butt”; “He followed her, watching her wide rear end” — all these appear, in the narrator’s voice, within twenty pages of each other. In the first two pages of one chapter we get: “the screaming and ass-chewing had ended hours ago. He’d have the pleasure of busting her ass.”

Grisham’s storytelling is so methodical his novels sometimes have the minimalist fascination of those repetitious passages in Beckett where a character moves stones from one pocket to another. At these moments, the books seem more akin to office supply catalogues than to traditional fiction.

I don’t know what to make of the fact that the main character has gotten younger in each of the books. In “A Time to Kill,” he’s a lawyer in his early thirties; in “The Firm” he’s a new hiree; in “The Pelican Brief” it’s a woman law student. In “The Client” it’s the 11-year-old boy. Is there anything to make of this? Grisham’s scrambled narrative voice — a potpourri of steals from movies and TV shows, premature wise-guy cynicism and self-pity — and the main characters do synch up a little better in “The Client” than in the earlier books.

But it’s almost impossible to understand what the central plot of the novel is. The setup is clear: a mob lawyer is trying to commit suicide. The boy tries to foil him. Drunk and morose, the mob guy tells the kid where a dead senator’s body has been buried, then manages to do himself in. But the rest of the book! The only thing that keeps it from shutting down entirely is that the boy can’t decide whether or not to tell anyone his secret.

That said, it’s easy to understand why, when you board a plane and walk to your seat, you see so many businesspeople reading a Grisham novel. The books are guileless expressions of America’s middle class. They aren’t middle America as seen and expressed by an artist; they’re middle America entertaining itself. A Grisham novel is cousin to those catalogues you find in the seat pockets of airplanes advertising desk accessories, leather business-card holders, fold-up luggage carts, pool floats and dopey gifts for the kids.

It’s bewildering, if rather sweet, in “The Firm” that the book simply assumes we’re going to identify with its main character — a nice guy, a little competitive maybe (Grisham’s concession to the fact that the guy’s actually a shark), who just wants to make money. He wants to achieve this by doing tax law, and we’re expected to say: Smart move, I can see doing that myself.

What’s on many millions of people’s minds is right there on the surface in these books. Nothing has been digested, nothing transformed. They’re as genuine and true to themselves as the work of what are usually thought of as folk artists, only the culture they issue from — middling colleges, suburbia, a couple of cars, concerns about savings plans and office politics — isn’t what we’re accustomed to thinking of as a folk culture. Even the suspense-novel frame has a middle-American purity. Grisham has spoken about learning how to do suspense from an article in Writer’s Digest: it’s a matter of lots of dialogue and action; creating a main character for people to identify with; trapping him in an evil conspiracy; closing things in around him; then getting him out.

What he puts in his books is exactly what’s in the air when you’re among hustling middle Americans. He’s one of them; he’s their boy. Here’s some of what’s in the novels:

  • The desire of middle Americans to retire early to someplace sunny.
  • Their attachment to seeing themselves as wised-up former idealists, although all they’ve ever really cared about is making money.
  • The vindictiveness they have towards media liberals, experts, technicians — “sophisticates.”
  • Their feelings of betrayal and aggrievedness. They once hoped they’d enjoy their job, and it has turned out to be a bore, and the people at the office are greedy creeps.
  • The way they live well but always feel anxious about money.
  • Their mixture of priggishness and lasciviousness. Even while they’re giving each other the eye, expressions of disgust — towards politicians, towards the aged — keep popping out of them.

The novel of his Grisham has said he cares most about is his first, “A Time to Kill.” The book involves his hero’s feelings about a case he has taken on: defending a black man accused of murdering two rednecks who raped his 10-year-old daughter. What Grisham’s hero feels angriest about is that he isn’t getting paid much for the case — which he has taken not because of any feelings about justice (it’s assumed we all agree that some people, in this case the rednecks, just deserve to die), but to get noticed.

He worries that the case will be stolen from him by a more famous lawyer. When it is, he berates the black prisoner for having ditched him in favor of the big-timer, and we’re expected to side with the main character in this scene — to agree that he’s being treated outrageously. He wins the case back — worrying some about the ethics of this — then blows a major part of the trial. He gets drunk. He stares at himself in the mirror. He pulls himself together for a winning, touchingly sincere final speech to the jury. (It’s perfect that Tom Cruise — master of willed ingenuousness — will be the first onscreen Grisham hero.) Our experience with novels leads us to expect “criticism” of such a hero for his inability to care about others. Here, the criticism never comes. The entire point is what he goes through to nail this case — essentially, to advance his career.

As a fantasy, this story is central to all of Grisham’s books. Sexually, what happens is: the Klan starts to make threats, and the main character sends his wife and daughter to his parents’ home. Instantly, a beautiful, liberal, intellectual, bra-less northern law student volunteers to assist on the case — she’s from Boston but is at school at Ole Miss. She buys beer and trades wiseass banter; she looks swell in her jeans (offering a fetching “rear view”). She does research — and her best to seduce the hero. She wants it; he does too. When things really warm up between them, she gets kidnapped by the Klan.

The scene where the Klan tortures her is the sexiest passage in Grisham, if you’re open to responding that way to this kind of thing. She’s tied facing a post in front of a burning cross. Her blouse, skirt and underwear are ripped from her back — bottom alert! The robed ones threaten to whip her; they chop her hair off and release her.

She’s alluring, she handles the complexities of the law more confidently than the hero can, and she’s a little too fast for him; she threatens to take him away from the mother-wife. So the Klan rises up and punishes her, because finally what she represents is “all crap” — one of Grisham’s, his narrator’s, and his characters’ favorite terms. The hero’s achievement in the novel is that he wins the case and he doesn’t fuck the northern girl.

Two key sentences appear in “A Time to Kill”: “he had never won an argument, in court or out, with an expert witness,” and “the embarrassment turned into anger.” These sentences express Grisham totally as a writer: resentment towards expertise, technique and sensitivity, and towards any perspective on his feelings about things.

The only other scene in Grisham that has any sexiness at all is in “The Firm.” The hero is in the Caymans, disapprovingly helping his boss launder some money, and (disapprovingly) watching the older man make out with young women. The hero rejects the advances of a few girls — rather nastily, as though their wanting to frolic made them disgusting. But then he has a few drinks, and a cute, mischievous girl in a bikini top and sarong lures him down the beach. They’re alone, it’s warm and the water is seductive. She unwraps the sarong and — she’s wearing not just a bikini bottom but a string/thong. He can’t resist playing with that string…For the rest of the novel he’s upset because he couldn’t resist fucking her. He wonders whether he should confess to his wife; we learn shortly that the beach girl was part of a conspiracy that’s entrapping the hero.

The central fantasy in all Grisham’s books is of being on the verge of puberty, getting a look at adulthood — yech, when that string comes off, it’s confusing, it’s disgusting — and managing to leap over it to a wonderful retirement where you still have your youth and looks. (This is adulthood as seen by a young boy: a matter of corruption, spies, conspiracies, wiretaps. The great thing is to outwit adulthood and get away with it.) Glimpsing power and sex, you return to Mom and escape with her to the sun, where bottoms are clean, plump and fresh –where they do nothing but arouse, and are wrapped up enticingly, like gifts and candies. Given that, it’s almost surreal to learn from published interviews that as many as two-thirds of Grisham’s readers are women, and also that he regrets having let his hero fuck the girl on the beach.

  • Buy a copy of “The Client.”
  • Francis Coppola’s film of Grisham’s “The Rainmaker” ain’t half bad. Buy a copy.
  • Though many people hated it, I loved Robert Altman’s atmospheric and satirical Grisham takeoff, “The Gingerbread Man,” starring Kenneth Branagh doing a great take on Bill Clinton.

©1993 by Ray Sawhill. First appeared in The Modern Review.

“Lullaby Town” by Robert Crais

crais

By Ray Sawhill

Elvis Cole, the hero of Robert Crais’ “Lullaby Town,” does business the California way — it looks like casual recreation to people from less forgiving climates. The genre hasn’t spawned a purer example of mankind in its L.A. incarnation than Elvis. When friends visit, he puts salmon and eggplant on the grill. His wisecracks usually include a movie reference. His detecting skill is always ready to be called on. But why make a big deal out of it?

In “Lullaby Town,” Crais’ third private-eye novel, Elvis is hired by a film director to find his ex-wife and child; the search leads to rural Connecticut and into the heart of a Manhattan mob family. Shivering in the cold and wincing at the filth, Elvis is unable to understand why anyone puts up with life in the Northeast. But he gets to the brutal heart of things in his own way, and he and his ninja-style partner make an impressive team. In terms of lethal efficiency, they’re a match for the bullet-spraying East Coast goons.

Crais has a reader-friendly style, and he’s a meticulous craftsman; the relaxed-seeming plot keeps paying off with scenes of surprising tension. Supple and low key, he’s actually far better at the private-eye-novel racket than most writers who make a loud point of being down and dirty. He gets the job done without losing track of the pleasure.

© 1992 by Newsweek, Inc. Reproduced by permission.