BigLaw Associate Suffers from Blackmail, Too, in Latest John Grisham Saga
Being in the wrong place at the wrong time with his college fraternity brothers, years ago, puts a young lawyer in a position to be blackmailed in the latest legal thriller by attorney John Grisham.
To make the money he needs to buy off his tormentor, the fictional Kyle McAvoy is forced to give up his dream of working as a public interest lawyer and take a $200,000-a-year post in a major New York law firm. But Grisham, who himself a former practitioner, has been writing more ambitious novels lately, and in The Associate, the dreary routine of a BigLaw drone’s daily existence also takes center stage, reports the Washington Post.
“I want to be a partner so I can sleep until 5:00 a.m. every day until I die at 50,” says McAvoy himself, at one point, of his career at Scully & Pershing.
“The Associate is, in its way, a devastating portrait of the big-time, big-bucks legal world,” the Post writes. “The only truly admirable lawyer we meet is Kyle’s father, a small-town practitioner who is beloved by his clients and hates that his son is prostituting his talents in New York.”
The plot, of course, is somewhat predictable, and it is a given in this kind of book that McAvoy never considers the obvious course of seeking help from authorities at the outset, the Post notes.
“With the help of a well-used cookie cutter [Grisham] delivers one more hard-charging book about the hellish demands of corporate law,” writes Janet Maslin, in a New York Times review of the book. True to form, The Associate ”grabs the reader quickly, becomes impossible to put down, stays that way through most of its story, and then escalates into plotting so crazily far-fetched that it defies resolution.”
The Associate is the 22nd book written by the former small-town practitioner.
Additional coverage:
Boston Globe: “Grisham returns to law’s underbelly”
TIME: “John Grisham’s Charming Novel About Nothing”
