The King of Torts

by John Grisham

Clay Carter is a lawyer, but a lowly one, earning about a teacher's pay at the Office of the Public Defender. His finacée's snobby, nouveau riche parents (cartoonish villains, environmentally-unfriendly urban developers and social climbers) dislike him and urge him to venture into higher-paying arenas of the law. But when Clay is tapped to defend a young man who shot an acquaintance for seemingly no reason, his fortune changes. It seems that a new drug was rushed through trials, and an unintended consequence is that it temporarily gives some takers an urge to kill. In his quest to defend his client, Clay gets too close to the truth. But is he targeted by an infinitely rich corporation? No! He is turned into a big-time tort lawyer on the victims' behalf and becomes a multimillionaire almost overnight. Instead of walking away, he embraces the life of a tort lawyer and finds complaints about diet pills and other drugs. As the massive tort cases come in, the nine-digit payoffs become regular, but Clay is spending nearly as much as he earns to get the cases. The private jets and islands are tempting, but a single mistake and he could be on the receiving end of a lawsuit himself.

So, this is a very tightly plotted legal thriller very much in the Grisham vein, with a large cast of characters and no shortage of thrills, not so much from suspense as through Clay's roller-coaster whirlwind race through the world of big tort settlements, very much out of his depth. There's drama, romance, obscene amounts of money, and social critique. The pacing is good, the characters are well drawn, and the commentary is cutting. What doesn't work so well, though, is the setup. This science-fiction idea, about a drug that turns people into killers, could have been the basis for the whole novel. Governments, radical groups, and other NGOs would pay vast amounts or kill to get their hands on that drug. Yet Grisham drops this element, treats it only as the basis for a tort claim, and then it's off to the exciting world of greedy tort lawyers. It seems to me that Grisham might have let this idea develop a little more and gotten a real thriller out of it. 

 

four stars

Diary of a Young Girl

by Anne Frank

translated by B.M. Mooyaart-Doubleday

The universally known story of how Anne, thirteen to fourteen at the time of writing, was hidden from the Nazis in the secret upstairs room of an office, along with her sister, parents, another family (the Van Daans) and a dentist. She describes her fights with her mother, moons over boys, dwells on her reading and studies, and describes the political situation. When the Nazis begin carting Jews off to camps, the diary turns more thoughtful as she describes the stress and discomfort of eight people hiding quietly in cramped quarters. They deal with burglars, the police (equally frightening), rotten food, shared chamber pots, and frayed nerves. She and the Van Daans’ boy, Peter, start to have romantic feelings for one another, and at this point the diary becomes half tween girl typically pining for and pinning her eternal happiness on this one boy, and half startlingly mature ruminations on war, human nature, her own talents, and her desire to put her “high ideals” into practice and better the world. And there, the diary ends, three days before they were betrayed, and a month later they would be among the last Jews sent to the death camps, less than two months before the Allies liberated Holland.

What can one say about this book? I should have read it earlier. Everyone should read it. It’s the achingly sad, human face of the Holocaust. Anne presciently wrote that she wished “to go on living even after my death,” and she did, perhaps even in a way she would have accepted if given the choice, knowing her writing would shine a light on evil for the next hundred years or more. 

five stars 

The Baron in the Trees

by Italo Calvino

translated by Archibald Colquhoun

At the age of twelve, Cosimo Rondò, son of the Baron Armino, tires of his family’s rules and his odd sister’s elaborate, nasty tricks and takes to the trees, never to set foot on the earth again. He wears furs and feathers and sleeps in the trees, hunting and trading for his meals. But he remains part of society, helping deal with wolves, fires, and fruit thieves, even getting an education and writing the occasional treatise on democracy and the rights of animals. As Cosimo says, "A gentleman is such whether he is on earth or on the treetops… if he behaves with decency." He also engages in several love stormy love affairs and befriends a tribe of Spanish exiles who, drolly, also live in the trees.

I first read this, I’d guess, around 1989. It made something of an impression on me then mostly for its fantastical, absurdist elements played almost completely straight. This time around, I enjoyed the broad and witty comedy and the rich language used to describe the natural world; I also liked the classical and historical allusions (for example, Cosimo is reading Gil Blas, itself a picaresque novel about a man forced to help robbers, when he is approached by a brigand looking for refuge). Does it all mean anything? Well, Calvino is exploring the ideas of alienation and refuting societal norms, but I’m not sure there’s anything like a philosophy here, and no more answers than there is a plot. It’s a wild ride, funny and rich, a fine example of Oulipo writing. I loved the ending. 

five stars