Having just finished my first John Grisham tale in a long, long while, Camino Island, I decided to try out a couple more, both The Rooster Bar and Gray Mountain. Different from Camino which follows more of a caper line, The Rooster Bar takes readers back to the grind of Grisham’s lawyers and their typical lawyering, though not in the strict, legal sense. Instead, this tale follows the misadventures of three law school drop-outs who decide to milk the DC law system for all it’s worth, yet without any license to do so.
In his author’s notes at the end of the book, Grisham admits that he got the idea for this novel from a magazine article about student loans, which isn’t surprising. This entire book feels like an extended, “What if?” experiment regarding students who pose as lawyers. Yet the great “What if?” explores something I’ve never wondered, deals with student loans which I’ve never experienced, and touches on illegal immigration which I’ve always avoided. Instead, my wife and I jumped through all the legal loops and paid our dues to immigrate legally, so I’ve little patience for anything else.
I say all that to admit that I didn’t particularly like this book. The characters were unappealing, and, while I knew the story was going somewhere, I was only mildly interested. While these kids insisted that their crimes were of the innocent kind, bothering no one, the truth is that they were ultimately criminals.
John Grisham is a sort of optimist, to which the endings of most of his novels can attest. But as a reader, I have a hard time buying into his particular brand of optimism. I’m pretty sure somewhere there’s written a challenge to believers not to pursue entertainment that glorifies evil, yet I think that’s precisely what this story does. The good guys are the bad guys, and in a sense, the bad guys win. That sort of ending doesn’t satisfy me, and honestly, I’m happy that’s the case. Enjoy the book if you like, but this is definitely not one of Grisham’s best.
©2018 E.T.
Read More from John Grisham:
- The Rainmaker (1995)
- The Street Lawyer (1998)
- Skipping Christmas (2001)
- A Painted House (2001)
- The Summons (2002)
- The Broker (2005)
- Playing for Pizza (2007)
- Gray Mountain (2015)
- Camino Island (2017)
- The Rooster Bar (2017)