The Client

By John Grisham

Happy Fourth of July!

Over the past few weeks, I've finished reading The Client by John Grisham, and I enjoyed every second of it.

Unlike the light/feel-good feeling of The Testament, The Client starts off dark, grabs the reader, and doesn't let him go until the very last sentence at the end of the novel. Most have probably seen the Hollywood picture starring Susan Sarandon and Tommy Lee Jones, but the film does not come close to the kind of high-tension that Grisham writes or the legal minefield that is the novel.

While reading this novel, it occurred to me that this novel has all the workings of a breakout thriller structure, such as Donald Maass details in his book Writing the Breakout Novel. From an exciting opening to a steady movement from plot point to plot point in short succession, Grisham gets an A+ when it comes to making the pages fly through the reader's fingers.

Although his novel moves so rapidly, he does not sacrifice character depth the way many thrillers tend to. I think the most fully-fleshed characters (besides the protagonist Mark Sway) would be Reggie Love and her assistant, Clint. Making use of brevity, Grisham condenses different layers to these characters instead of stripping them out completely, intertwining their backgrounds in such a way that they enrich the story rather than bog it down.

If there was a situation in the book where I felt this didn't work as well, it would be with Mark's mother, Dianne, who in some sections came across as flat with her character reactions. Some of them made me wonder if the writer's children had been born at the time this was published. Still, the overall efforts of condensed characterization paid off for Grisham in the long-run since many of the scenes with Dianne were short and limited, thus concealing his Achilles heel enough that it did not make the novel feel plastic in its construction.

The conflict-- while dark-- was layered and complicated enough that the decisions of the characters read organic. If I had any major issues with the conflict at all, it was only that in some areas it felt like it was handled with kid gloves, so it would appeal to parents without reading too dark. My feelings on this are that Grisham could have easily gone a little darker at the climax without sacrificing the integrity of safety a reader feels when cracking open a thriller novel.

Thrillers/suspense novels (like horror) are, after all, one of the massive rollercoasters of the library amusement parks if we think of literary novels like ferris wheels. And there is plenty of fun to be had by a writer when they strap a reader into a seat and loop them upside down.

This criticism of the climax aside, I loved The Client, and Grisham more than compensated for the kid gloves with the ending. The final three chapters--while short--tied everything together so wonderfully that it binds the entire text tightly and leaves the reader slightly disappointed that it's all over (when all they really want to do is know what happens after THE END).

I would highly recommend this book to anyone remotely interested in studying how a thriller should be executed and/or how to add depth to a child protagonist (because Grisham worked wonders with young Mark Sway).

A must-read, folks!