Associate This

The Associate by John Grisham. Every couple of years, I like to remind myself why I stopped reading his books. And this one was a really good reminder.

I was a big fan back in the nineties, when he first came out. I read all the books, watched most of the movies. But the stuff he writes now is so. . . different. In the last couple of books of his I've read, it seems like when the time comes for the crap to hit the fan, he just flushes the crap instead. Sure, it's nice and clean, but not nearly as exciting. Nowadays, he seems far more interested in preaching his ideals on the legal profession than in writing actual thrillers.

The Associate is Kyle McAvoy. A different name, but basically the same character that stars in every Grisham novel. A wet-behind-the-ears kid, fresh out of law school, who has to take on the world and figure out how to outsmart everyone. He's Mitch McDeere, he's Darby Shaw, he's Rudy Baylor.

Kyle is just finishing up law school at Yale and is planning to work for a public-interest firm after graduation when a bad guy surfaces with a video, secretly taken by a cell phone, which reveals the badwy details of a drunken frat party five years earlier. The video contains evidence that a couple of Kyle's buddies had relations with a girl who may have been unconcious at the time. Although the video contains no evidence than Kyle did anything worse than dancing in the nude, he's shaken that the evidence exists.

The bad guy offers Kyle a deal. In exchange for keeping the video and the potential rape allegation under wraps, Kyle must accept a position in New York City with the largest law firm in the world and steal documents related to a gigantic lawsuit between two defense contractors. High-stakes blackmail!

The first few pages of this book are great, and I admit that I was immediately sucked into the plot. The pace slows as the book progresses. The bad guys patiently wait for the chance to have Kyle make a move. Meanwhile, Kyle spends most of his time trying to figure out how to outsmart them while also being the hardest working first-year associate at the firm.

I don't know that the bad guys were actually super hard to outsmart. They actually seemed a little lame to me. When Kyle started his job, they demanded a look at his company-issued laptop and phone. He refused to do so, and they never bothered him about it again. Seems like pretty lame surveillance to me.

***SPOILER ALERT (IF YOU CARE)***
Somehow, Kyle manages to hire a lawyer, who notifies the FBI. They organize an operation to catch the bad guy when Kyle brings stolen files to him. But the bad guy somehow gets wind of it and disappears. And that's it. They don't catch him. So, who was this bad guy? Who was he working for? Why did they want the files? Where did he get the cell phone video? How did he know the FBI was coming for him?

NONE of these questions get answered. Grisham suggests a bunch of possibilities, but I guess decides to let the reader ponder them eternally. It seems like maybe he wrote himself into a corner and said, "Ah, screw it, I can't figure this out either. The end."
***END OF SPOILER ALERT (IF YOU CARE)***

I'm not the only one who feels this way. Reviewers on Amazon were furious about this one. They can't figure out why he would just decide not to write the end of the book. There won't be a sequel, because who would buy it? Most people seem to think that Grisham is so rich he doesn't really care about pleasing the reader anymore. Others are speculating that The Associate was (gasp) ghostwritten.

I'm glad that I checked this out at the library. Some folks actually paid full cover price to read it.