Title: The Litigators
Author: John Grisham
Progress: 20%
Platform: Kindle
Amazon Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
NYT BS Hardcover List: #1 (debuted at number 1)
Book 4 out of 107
So many characters! Oscar, Wally, Rochelle, David, AC, the bartender, the billionaire old lady, the evil boss, David's wife, they are all running around the first nine chapters of The Litigators and I am having a hard time keeping track of who is who, what they look like and what they want.
It's like Mr. Grisham decided to clear out every character sketch he happened to have in his journal and dumped them into this book.
The result is a lot of stops and starts in the first quarter, quite a few backstory segments, and then a lot of trying to remember the difference between some of the characters, especially Wally and Oscar.
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| About this many people are introduced in the first nine chapters of The Litigators |
Things start off fantastically. We get a lovely character sketch of two lawyers struggling to keep their ambulance chasing shop open. One guy is neat, one is a slob. One guy is organized, steady, yet lazy. The other guy is scattered, prone to wild mood swings, and aggressively ambitious. One is named Oscar, one is named Wally.
I kept getting them confused until I noted that Oscar is the neat one, which is the opposite of the Oscar in The Odd Couple.
The book bounces back and forth between the schyster duo and David Zinc, a young lawyer with a Harvard degree who freaks outs from all the pressure of working at a big firm and decides to chuck it all. He goes on an entertaining bender at a local bar and as fate would have it, winds up at the low rent law firm and ends up working there.
Is it entertaining so far? Yes! But it's like two Grisham books have been cut and pasted into each other. David all by himself would make a good book about the horrors of working for a big firm, the 16 hours days, the angry boss, the strained marriage. Awesome. Let's have a book about that.
Or, let's have a book about the hustling, scrappy, bottom-feeding lawyers that plaster their faces on in billboards and bus stop. Mr. Grisham seems to know that world well, as the scenes where Wally is chasing business in funeral homes and hospitals are filled with the kind of detail only research can provide.
As soon as we get into one of these stories, we shift to the other one and have to re-adjust, remind ourselves who is who, and get back into it.
To me, it seems like the whole thing would work better with fewer characters, with fewer three page backstory descriptions, and with fewer names to remember.
I like the idea of a high-priced lawyer working down in the muck of a swamp firm. But that swamp firm could have one partner, not two, and the secretary could be a minor background character, not someone whose life history gets five pages.
That is my advice to Mr. Grisham, who could surely use my advice, him being one of the most successful authors in history, and me with a 125 Twitter followers.
What have we learned? I think we've learned that too many character too soon and clutter your opening chapters and hurt your narrative flow. I also think this story would be more interesting told from one point of view, instead of the shifting between five characters.
I'm also looking forward to reading more. This is a good read, funnier than expected for a Grisham.
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