The Summons

Grisham Comes Home

Well, the good news is that John Grisham has returned to doing what he was put on earth to do: write legal thrillers. The bad news is that The Summons, Grisham's first courtroom novel since The Brethren, reads as though he wrote it in about an hour.

Two brothers, one a responsible-seeming law professor, the other an alcoholic screw-up, are called back home to Mississippi to sort out their dying father's estate. But Dad, who had been an esteemed local judge but was by all accounts a cheap and miserable old bastard in his personal life, is already dead when the good son arrives home. Imagine good son Ray's surprise, then, when he discovers twenty-seven boxes of cash, each containing about $100,000, among the old man's stuff! Ray doesn't tell anyone about the money, especially not his deadbeat brother, Forrest. Ray subsequently sort of loses his shit, takes to guarding the boxes of cash with a gun (despite the fact that, given what we know about his character, he's somewhat more in-control than that), and becomes generally paranoid and unpleasant. And then there's the issue of the anonymous extortionist, which doesn't do much to improve Ray's already shaky mental state.

The Summons is entirely without movement, tension, and suspense -- the qualities which made The Firm and The Pelican Brief, for instance, far superior books. In the place of real character development we find shorthand signifiers of personality, most of which have to do with what kinds of food characters order in restaurants. (There hasn't been this much food in a novel since Hannibal, that gluttonous spectacle.) Another problem: In place of plot, we have really, really bad dialogue doing the work of plot (and I use that word loosely). Here is an example:

"Is he really dead?" he managed to say with his jaws clenched.

"Yes, Forrest."

He swallowed hard and fought back tears and finally said, "About five, I guess. I walked in, thought he was napping, then realized he was dead."

"I'm sorry you had to find him," Forrest said, wiping the corners of his eyes.

"Somebody had to."

One needn't be a creative writing professor to recognize this as lousy writing, phoned-in, and, above all else, faked. There's nothing to believe in The Summons, nothing whatsoever.

Adrienne Miller is Esquire's literary editor.

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