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A 70mm Novel

John Grisham certainly had Hollywood in sight when he wrote The Associate. You can’t blame him because he’s been there done that before with The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client, The Runaway Jury, A Time to Kill, The Rainmaker and The Chamber.

The best-selling author’s larger vision for fiction has met with its fair share of success, and The Associate is likely to join the ranks. This novel’s been booked for screen, so to speak, a natural progression for Grisham to reach out to a wider audience.

The characters in The Associate pass the screen test, the situations are familiar, the predictable suspense comes in spurts; there’s legal wrangling, which isn’t a surprise coming from Grisham, who makes no bones about his grand reel schemes. It’s hard to read the book without envisioning a Hollywood set blocking out 
the imagination.

Little time is wasted on the plot with Kyle McAvoy, the protagonist heading straight into a spot of bother, which is soon blown out of proportion. He falls for blackmail over an alleged sexual romp because he has scarce time to think. Old, unproven rape charges are held out as a threat by a bad guy who goes by the name of Bennie Wright as Kyle gets his enviable career off to a wrong start at the world’s biggest legal firm (no less) on Wall Street.

A topper at Yale Law School, Kyle realises that a fat pay packet an associate receives cannot win him happiness. To add to his misery, Bennie’s prying eyes watch every move with goons tailing him, cameras monitoring him, and bugs hearing him out of his sleep-deprived existence. He’s soon ordered to bend the law by his handler to steal secrets on a leading defence company which his firm represents.

The narrative stutters, and the characters, perhaps with the exception of Kyle’s dad John, who practises law in a small town in Pennsylvania, lack spunk, but what clicks is the made-for-movies conversational tone of the book which the average reader can read in a breeze.

Grisham gets under the skin of the legal trade like no other author does, portraying the fears and frustrations of the young associates and the greed of the experienced partners. The more hours they bill on the job makes them rise higher up the corporate ladder. The author takes a long, hard look at Wall Street excesses with its relentless pursuit of power and lucre.

You can call it a streak of clairvoyance, an inside job which looks at the mess with contempt. It’s a sign of the times, the novelist seems to suggest with some condescension thrown in 
for effect.

But Kyle’s life is spinning out of control in a whirlpool of discontent and deception and he can’t take it anymore. So, he gets some sage advise from dad, lets the FBI into his ‘dirty’ little secret while looking for the escape hatch.

The denouement, or the lack of it is rather tame, throwing up more questions than answers. Fingers are pointed all around because the whodunnit can never be cracked. Those investigating it could be behind it. Conspiracy theories ... yawn. Haven’t we heard that before?

Grisham doesn’t want his young, civil hero to stand up and fight, to fling the muck around. Kyle would rather settle down in his hometown for the real legal stuff with real people. Makes sense if you see the larger picture.Over to lights, camera, action.

allan@khaleejtimes.com

• UAE