For famous, mega-selling authors, genre-jumping is supposed to be a one-off, temporary downtime for when they want a break from routine. When Patricia Cornwell got a little weary of fictional forensics expert Kay Scarpetta, she turned to a nonfiction investigation of Jack the Ripper and then went back to made-up suspense a year later.
But John Grisham’s situation may be different. “Bleachers,” Grisham’s third excursion into non-legal-thriller fiction in the past couple of years “(A Painted House,” “Skipping Christmas),” seems to be an obvious signal that the author who has arguably become America’s most popular novelist just doesn’t want to write about lawyers in peril anymore.
And the literary high points of “A Painted House,” with its dead-on depiction of rural Depression farm life, and “Skipping Christmas,” which revamped the Dickensian Scrooge theme to modern, quirky levels, suggested that Grisham probably did have something to offer other than the fun-to-read courtroom potboilers that sold as fast as they were placed on bookstore shelves.
He was, obviously, an author who wanted to leave some sort of lasting printed legacy to the world as well as millions of royalty dollars to his heirs.
But “Bleachers” is less literary legacy than literary landfill. It’s a novel that mimics the very worst of simple-minded best-sellerdom, with themes of love lost and hope regained that have already been mined in similar one-dimensional fashion by such lightweights as Nicholas Sparks and Richard Paul Evans. Sure, it’ll be a best-seller, because there are Grisham fans who’ll buy anything with his name on it.
John Grisham is a capable author who, through a combination of talent and luck (because writing talent isn’t enough to gain best-sellerdom – Paul Auster, John Edgar Wideman and many others are proof of that) has sold millions of books to people who like to read courtroom dramas.
If “Bleachers” is just a break from routine, then it’s merely a bad blip in an otherwise good career. But if this simplistic pap represents the kind of fiction to which John Grisham eventually intends to devote himself, then jump ship while you can still remember most of his past work with fondness rather than sorrow.
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