COMMENTARY: Grisham moves from entertainer to moralist

c. 1998 Religion News Service (Dale Hanson Bourke is publisher of RNS.) UNDATED _ Most of us read novels for entertainment, but writers craft fiction for a variety of reasons. Many authors simply want to tell a good story with the hopes of selling enough books to make a living. Others offer glimpses into different […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Dale Hanson Bourke is publisher of RNS.)

UNDATED _ Most of us read novels for entertainment, but writers craft fiction for a variety of reasons.


Many authors simply want to tell a good story with the hopes of selling enough books to make a living. Others offer glimpses into different worlds. And some writers use fiction as a powerful tool to expose injustice or change the perspective of the reader.

Writers such as Charles Dickens and Sinclair Lewis offered such compelling insights into their times that their novels are studied as much for content as style. Their works were necessary to inform the people of their day of the deplorable conditions that existed.

Today we live in a world overwhelmed by information. Few of us are left wanting for knowledge. But many of us suffer from overload and quickly learn to tune out messages we don’t consider pertinent to our experience.

A good example of this is how most of us view the homeless. We know they exist, but few of us understand _ or even want to understand _ much about their problems.

Best-selling author John Grisham empathizes with such a perspective. He admits he knew nothing about homelessness until he began to conduct research for his latest book,”The Street Lawyer”(Doubleday).

The novel is set near my own Washington, D.C., neighborhood, and deals with the two groups of people I am certain to encounter every day: lawyers and street people. And based on my experience, Grisham moved from ignorance to profound insight in the development of this story.”The Street Lawyer”is, in many ways, vintage Grisham. The characters are believable, the action well crafted. There is enough tension to make the reader turn pages quickly, but not so much as to make reading an unpleasant experience.

But in other ways, this Grisham book is different. It takes us through an education process that does more to shed light on the homeless than any organization or study or activist has ever done.

And by educating us while entertaining, Grisham takes a step toward assuming a different role for his books.


Grisham’s main character, Mike Brock, is a likable, hard-working lawyer slaving away in a fancy law firm, hoping to make partner by billing more hours than the next guy. Had all gone according to plan, he would have traded in his Lexus for a Mercedes and his chic apartment in Georgetown for a sprawling Potomac mansion.

But he was rescued from such a safe, bourgeois existence by a chance encounter with a street person who threatens his life and starts a process that, in a different way, saves it.

Brock, like most of us, sees the homeless as a homogenous group of smelly, mentally ill or drug-dependent people who are down on their luck or have simply chosen to drop out of society.

But when he is held hostage by a street person and forced to understand the reasons for one individual’s homelessness, he loses his ability to dismiss the entire group.

As he tries to assuage some of his emerging guilt by volunteering in a shelter, he encounters another casualty of society: the homeless children whose lives are neither valued nor protected.

At that point Brock is forced to decide if he will take a radical turn, leaving his lucrative practice to become a”street lawyer.”To Grisham’s credit, he doesn’t take this decision lightly. Brock is confronted with the loss of wealth, prestige and even his marriage.


Grisham seems very aware of the biblical challenge:”Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” And Grisham is also careful to authentically represent the challenges of working with the homeless. There is little romanticism in his description of those who seem sane but are deeply troubled, the drug addicts who keep promising to come clean and the frightened individuals who won’t stay in one place long enough to get help.

But within the layered story of”The Street Lawyer”is a thread of hope and a sense that the idealism we often feel at the start of a career can be reclaimed if we are willing to be downwardly mobile. The payoffs are far less tangible, but Grisham’s skillful writing helps us understand their importance.”The Street Lawyer”may not be Grisham’s best work as pure entertainment, but it may be a transitional work taking him from the best-seller list to an important place in history.

Books like this are prophetic, not because they speak about an issue we haven’t known about, but because they cause us to hear voices we have ignored. In our information-glutted society, fiction may be the best way to educate us about subjects we can’t morally ignore.

DEA END BOURKE

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