King of novelists

The King of Torts John Grisham. New York: Doubleday, 2003

What to do with Christian writer John Grisham, who writes such non-Christian novels? Grisham, a former lawyer, says he writes about lawyers and therefore he writes about sin.

His latest offering, King of Torts, is purportedly about a young lawyer who becomes involved in the lucrative world of class action lawsuits, but if we look beneath the surface and pay attention to the clues that Grisham gives us, we realize that the book is really about the destructive power of greed. Like main character Clay Carter, many of us start off thinking that the temptations of wealth won’t affect us, only to find that they do and that our spending on personal pleasures increases as fast, or faster, than our ability to pay for them. Grisham, as a lawyer and a highly successful novelist, must have learned from experience the temptations that come with having unexpected millions of dollars. We may not have the same number of dollars, but our temptations are only quantitatively, not qualitatively, different.

Christian readers may well be disappointed with the incompleteness of the main character’s transformation in the end, but that in itself may give us cause to reflect on the incompleteness of our own transformation. There are other, more powerful examples of the constructive power of loyalty, goodness, honesty, love and even Christian salvation in the book. This is not a “Christian” book, but it may well be a prophetic one, forcing us to face honestly our own sinfulness and temptations.

Jim Coggins is editor of the MB Herald.