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Grisham uses his courtroom clout to show contempt for lawyers

Sunday, February 16, 2003

By Barbara Vancheri, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Reading a John Grisham legal thriller is like skimming over the water in a speedboat. Everything moves very quickly, and there's no time to drop anchor in the deep water and really explore the surroundings. Still, he has such a senstive finger on the pulse of America that maybe he should write medical thrillers instead of legal ones.

	"The King of Torts" By John Grisham Doubleday ($27.95)

In his 15th novel, he tackles the world of mass torts, where lawyers troll for clients who may have been wronged -- by a faulty drug, for instance -- and sue the manufacturer and make millions in the process. The attorneys walk (or fly, in their posh private jets) away with a fortune and the poor schmo who took a prescribed pill for his arthritis gets a mere $43,000 and, later, malignant tumors in his bladder.

"The King of Torts" is a Washington, D.C., lawyer named Clay Carter, although he hasn't earned that sobriquet in the first chapter. He's toiling "far down in the minor leagues" of lawyering, working as a public defender and kicking himself because he didn't scramble out of the courtroom fast enough before being handed another murder case.

Clay is 31 years old, burned out and dating a woman with a nouveau-riche father who considers him a loser. His luck -- and moral compass -- are about to change, however, when a stranger representing a blue-chip company that makes pharmaceuticals arrives in town and makes him an offer that he could but doesn't refuse.

His newest client, the accused murderer, was an unwitting guinea pig for a drug designed to cure addiction but with a nasty side effect in some patients. It turned them into killers.

Clay agrees to quietly clean up this mess, and when this deal with the devil is done, he is in private practice, $15 million richer and in possession of documents that will allow him to start playing with the big boys of mass tort litigation.

Turns out there's an arthritis drug that works wonders but has been linked to bladder tumors, prompting Clay to file a billion-dollar lawsuit against the third-largest pharmaceutical company in the world. Soon, he becomes the very sort of lawyer he once despised: amassing thousands of anonymous clients through misleading and scary TV ads, a $30 million private jet and a trophy girlfriend.

But, as is the pattern in such stories, Clay is headed for a fall and the only question is: How big and who will tumble down with him?

Thirteen will, no doubt, prove to be another lucky number for Grisham, who has written a dozen legal thrillers and two other works of fiction, the slender guilty pleasure "Skipping Christmas" and fictional Southern reminiscence, "A Painted House." He has the formula down pat and has become like the child in an elementary school art class who can outline a drawing with the neatest of crayon strokes but rarely bothers to color between the lines.

For every fictitious variation on the diet drug fen-phen or problematic hormone replacements, there is Grisham's lazy descriptions of his characters. I never was able to conjure up a mental picture of Clay, while his acquisitive girlfriend seems lifted from the male-fantasy catalog: onetime lingerie model, with blond hair, aqua eyes, high cheekbones and a habit of shedding her clothes around bodies of water.

As much as Grisham demonizes lawyers -- just wait until the part where they're courting overweight clients with possible heart damage -- he also uses one to summarize the problem with the legal system.

An Arizona lawyer who accepts only three cases a year and never settles out of court lectures a chastened Clay: "Mass torts are a scam, a consumer rip-off, a lottery driven by greed that will one day harm all of us. Unbridled greed will swing the pendulum to the other side. Reforms will take place, and they'll be severe. You boys will be out of business but you won't care because you'll have the money. The people who'll get harmed are all the future plaintiffs out there, all the little people who won't be able to sue for bad products because you boys have screwed up the law."

"The King of Torts" has many of the Grisham touchstones or, perhaps, crutches: private planes, secret accounts, Caribbean getaways, the perils and isolation of sudden wealth and, ultimately, the desire to escape to a place where nobody knows your name. It's far from the best-written novel I've read, but I sped through it in two afternoons. And I will never look at another early-morning TV ad soliciting people who took a good drug-gone-bad in quite the same way.