“The Firm” is my first John Grisham novel, and I haven’t seen the 1993 film adaptation either. Going into this, all I knew about this book was the blurb on the back, that this was one of the highest selling books of the 1990s, and that it has a twist.
The first thing that stood out to me while reading was that John Grisham epitomizes the adage “Write what you know”. While speaking as– and about his protagonist Mitch McDeere, Grisham writes with a voice of personal experience so familiar that it’s obvious Mitch is the amalgam of Grisham’s own experiences as a young lawyer.
I don’t want to spoil anything, but the following is set up pretty plain as day in the first half of the book. The firm in “The Firm” really is just too good to be true. They’re bad dudes.
“When you were in law school you had some noble idea of what a lawyer should be. A champion of individual rights; a defender of the Constitution; a guardian of the oppressed; an advocate for your client’s principles. Then after you practice for six months you realize we’re nothing but hired guns. Mouthpieces for sale to the highest bidder, available to anybody, any crook, any sleazebag with enough money to pay our outrageous fees. Nothing shocks you. It’s supposed to be an honorable profession, but you’ll meet so many crooked lawyers you’ll want to quit and find an honest job. Yeah, Mitch, you’ll get cynical. And it’s sad, really.”
-John Grisham, “The Firm”
As the story progressed, Grisham began to seriously gross me out with his character’s views on money. Every evil action is lauded when done to pursue money. Nothing is inexcusable if it’s for MORE money. Even with the fact that many real people’s MacGuffin is “money” I started to get tired of such a one-dimensional goal.
But then it turned out perfect, and that gross feeling was exactly what Grisham had been intentionally cultivating the whole time. Even Mitch the protagonist has a moment of realization just after the big twist. This turns the money theme inside out and into a much more enjoyable theme: being trapped by the excess of money, a fresh reprieve from the tried and true “trapped by the shortage of money” that most of us feel so poignantly in our real lives.
With just a few exceptions, I don’t find myself reading much pop-fiction unless it fits nicely into my geeky hobbies. I’ll work on this. I mention this because I found something very different about this novel than most I read and in retrospect it kind of surprises me in how obviously useful it is. It’s the pacing. The pacing in this book is so consistent that I’d go as far as saying it’s rhythmic.
Due to my preferences in fiction (elves and swords, please), the stories I read are prone to literal three hundred page yarns of backstory and worldbuilding, with perhaps a minor bump of conflict only to spur us on to one final cataclysmic climax. The pacing in “The Firm” is nothing like that, and in my amateur opinion, a large contributing factor in its popular success. If you make it to a page where it feels like “the coals are burning low”, Grisham shatters a molotov cocktail on the next page. Wake up! They did what?
If I had to make a negative comment, I’d say the characters kind of began to blend together. For instance, if I didn’t immediately remember which actions to attribute to a name, I could check context clues and classify the character into generic categories of “cop”, “lawyer”, or “senior partner”, and this was consistently successful for me throughout the book. Lambert and Locke technically have different personalities, but they’re the same cog in the machine.
Mitch and the bad guys both develop some keen spidey-senses pre-climax, which results in a fun romping zenith. As the chips start falling, you know there’s going to be a fight or a chase, and the reader isn’t disappointed. If I had to describe reading “The Firm” in one word, I’d say “breezy”, and I’d mean it as a compliment. Grisham’s prose is so digestible this is a perfect candidate for reader’s with limited time or commitment.
While I still see the term “Legal Thriller” as an oxymoron, John Grisham’s second novel and career-maker “The Firm” definitely showed me why he has the fans he does.
