The Appeal by John Grisham

But all is not well for the company's owner, one Carl Trudeau, who soon discovers that the supreme court isn't likely to be friendly. With the help of a shady businessman whose business doesn't officially exist, Trudeau decides to buy himself a judge. A young lawyer is pulled from his practice and plunged into a multi-million dollar campaign for a seat on the court.

Meanwhile, the lawyers who sued Krane Chemical are going bankrupt, and making every effort to push back and reelect their friendly judge who Trudeau is trying to boot out.

It's definitely a timely novel, especially considering its release in an election year. It has all of the intellectual markings of a great political novel, though it falls short in a few other areas, as we'll discuss in a moment.

Politically speaking, the book's points are made clearly enough: we need to maintain strong judicial avenues for victims to seek redress from professional wrongdoings, and we need to make damned sure our courts are not politicized to the point that someone can buy a seat for several million dollars and a lot of appeals to the religious right (remember, the book takes place in Mississippi, so the appeals to the religious play a strong role, but the point is equally as valid for any other type of emotional argumentation). Indeed, the all-too-accurate descriptions of Christian bigotry and homophobia were enough to make me cringe in several locations. One example, from page 128: "And while they were on the subject, what about gays? Gay marriage? Absolutely not! Civil Unions? No, sir, not in Mississippi. Gays adopting children? No, sir." Grisham is to be commended for painting a vivid portrait of just how stupid this sort of fundamentalism is, without rubbing the reader's nose in it.

From a structural point of view, the novel is not quite as much as it could be. The plot keeps ripping ahead at full speed, which does keep the reader on the edge of his seat, but it doesn't allow much time or space for descriptions. Though we all know the book takes place in Mississippi because we're told so, there is little in the actual narrative description that makes the reader "feel" Mississippi. It could just as easily be any other state and make little difference. It costs none of the books intellectual merits, but it does create a small vacuum where we may have found the emotional attraction of actually being able to feel ourselves in the setting with the characters.

By the same token, the characters themselves are well-drawn intellectually, but lack emotional charge. The reader gets to know them in an intellectual sense, and gets to know their situation, but fails to really get under their skin and "feel" their problems from an emotional point of view. This does not harm the novel in a serious way, but fails to move it up from a "good" novel to a "great" one.

Plot-wise, the story is great, and keeps moving forward at just about the right speed. Actually it could be even a bit slower, but that's a complaint against the drawing of setting and character as I mentioned above, not the plot itself. It's definitely an intriguing story that keeps the reader interested in what's going to happen next from the very first page.

The final chapters threatened to produce a corny and pretentious ending, but the actual conclusion far exceeded my expectations, making a complete turn-around from the cheesy ending I had come to expect, which makes this book all the better. It takes skill to lead a reader toward one conclusion and then make such an abrupt turn-around, and Grisham did it extremely well.

Overall, I found this to be quite a good book, but not quite a great book because of a few minor flaws.

3.5 out of 5

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