Ford County
John Grisham
Doubleday, 2009

We don’t get to have it both ways; we can’t both deride our bestselling authors for being formulaic and automatically scorn their attempts to break out of the patterns that’ve served them so well. Alison Weir writes a historical novel and gets called a traitor to the Muse Clio; Thomas Pynchon writes a goofy stoner-gumshoe novella and gets bricks thrown at him in the pages of The Little Magazine; it isn’t fair – who are we to tell a successful writer, “no, no, stay right where you are so we can keep disparaging you”?

We get another chance to get it right with the release of Ford County, a collection of seven short stories by John Grisham. The author, as all the world knows, has written over a dozen legal thrillers that sell in their mindless gazillions. After producing a string of titles like The Appeal, The Summons, The Testament, and The Partner, Grisham could be reasonably suspected of having thoroughly surrendered to his whoredom – and yet, he’s also consistently wandered off-pasture, with non-jurisprudential novels like Skipping Christmas and Playing for Pizza. In Ford County, he tells several stories set in semi-rural Mississippi and is clearly aiming at that damned elusive sub-genre, “literary fiction.”

Webs dvd There are several problems with this, of course. Even leaving aside the fact that writing Southern fiction in America puts you in direct comparison (we won’t even speak of competition) with some of the greatest writers in the country’s literature, there’s the sad reality that writing muscles learn bad habits just as surely as weight-lifting muscles do; it’s arrogant for an author to think he can shed those bad habits just by adopting a drawl. It’s not just that Grisham doesn’t do much work to shed his legalese, although there’s that:

“Don’t quote me on that,” was a defensive ploy aimed at disclaiming what had just been said. Once properly disclaimed, others were free to go ahead and repeat what had just been said, but if the information turned out to be false, the original gossiper could not be held liable.

It’s more than that. “Literary fiction,” when it’s done well, is characterized by evocative settings, well-realized dialogue, and complex, satisfyingly lifelike characters. Successful legal potboilers don’t need any of those things, and writing those things well takes years and years of practice – and a certain amount of innate skill. You can’t achieve the same effect by having your characters interbreed like bunnies and then declaring a fiat, although Grisham tries:

“I figured out who she is. I’ve lived here for a long time, son, and I can’t remember much. But there was a time when most everybody knew who she was. One of her husbands was a cousin to one of my wives. I think that’s right. A long time ago.”

You gotta love small towns.

The whole point here is that you don’t gotta love small towns – the writer’s gotta make us love small towns, if that’s his goal. In legal thrillers, Grisham can simply tell us “she was mean,” and we’re expected to play along, to keep the story moving. In “literary” – that is, serious, adult – fiction, Grisham has to show us these things, and it’s no wonder he can’t really do it, considering how little practice he’s had.

We can’t fault him for trying in Ford County. There’s some good low-key comedy in this collection’s opening story, “Blood Drive,” for instance, and the best story, “Quiet Haven,” features as its narrator a nursing home grifter who inhabits an interesting moral grey zone that will satisfy all but the most fastidious short story reader. But there are far too many sassy waitresses, far too much Jim Beam in clinking glasses, far too many people reckoning instead of thinking – far too much caricature instead of character, in other words. The result feels like Southern-lite laptopped from a Chelsea loft during intermittent bursts of nostalgia.

The repair for this isn’t far to seek, but it’s clearly unpalatable to our yearning author. Grisham has written two full-length legal thriller novels in the last eight months, and there’s no reason on Earth not to think he’ll do the same thing in the next eight months. But if he’s serious about writing serious fiction – if he genuinely wants to reach that small slice of readers out there who’ve always disdained his very existence – he needs to take a couple of years off, do no legal thrilling, and try a little agonizing. We don’t get to have it both ways, but neither does he.

–Amanda Bragg