Former lawyer John Grisham stands tall as one of the most talented and successful novelists alive. A switch to non-fiction (presumably temporary) for his 19th book leaves him looking like a mere mortal.
Grisham’s first true story, The Innocent Man (2007, London, Arrow Books, 501 pages), badly disappoints, partly because the famous author’s reputation stirs lofty expectations. This book’s bestseller status appears undeserved.
The Innocent Man tells the tragic tale of Ron Williamson, a small-town baseball star from Ada, Oklahoma. Ron fell short of big-league glory, thanks to injuries and heavy drinking. Then he struck out again, his freedom lost and sanity jeopardized, after false accusations of rape and murder in 1982. His problems deepened and the injustice worsened due to shoddy police work and malicious prosecution. Soon the innocent man marked time on death row.
“The horror of the place was bad enough for real murders, but for an innocent man it was literally maddening….
“They’re all killers, Ronnie kept saying, and all they talk about is killing. It’s everywhere on The Row. Get me out! Did he feel safe?... Hell no, not living with a bunch of killers. He had always believed in the death penalty, but now he was a die-hard supporter of it. He kept such opinions quiet, though, in his new neighborhood.
“Ron soon began pacing and yelling in his cell…. He stood at his door and screamed, ‘I am innocent! I am innocent!’ for hours, until he became hoarse. With practice, though, his voice strengthened, and he could shout for longer periods of time. ‘I did not kill Debbie Carter. I did not kill Debbie Carter.’ ”
Despite Grisham’s ability to crisply pace fiction, this factual account bogs down in frivolous details – everything from Ron’s boyhood baseball stats to the biographies of people he knew.
“With every visit and every conversation, the story took a different twist. I could’ve written 5,000 pages,” Grisham said. Thankfully, he stopped at 501 pages, many of them tedious. This potentially fascinating read demands entirely too much time and effort.
Wearied by misfortune, Ron died of liver failure at age 51. “Inoperable, untreatable, no chance of a transplant, it was another death sentence, and a painful one at that.”
The book emerged after Grisham took an interest in Ron’s obituary. “Not in my most creative moment could I conjure up a story as rich and layered as Ron’s.”
He contacted the Williamson family. “Writing non-fiction has seldom crossed my mind – I’ve had far too much fun with the novels – and I had no idea what I was getting into. The story, and the research and writing of it, consumed the next 18 months. It took me to Ada many times, to the courthouse and jail and coffee shops around town, to both the old death row and the new one….”
Grisham redeems some of the book’s weaknesses by drawing important conclusions: “The journey also exposed me to the world of wrongful convictions, something that I, even as a former lawyer, had never spent much time thinking about. This is not a problem peculiar to Oklahoma, far from it. Wrongful convictions occur every month in every state in this country….”
The author’s 18 novels, many of them made into Hollywood movies, are well known: A Time to Kill, The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client, The Runaway Jury, The Broker and A Painted House, among others.
No one dares to suggest that Grisham should stick to novels. But he needs to make adjustments, striving for brevity and sticking to essential details, in any future non-fiction.
Approval rating: 28 per cent.
For more information: www.johngrisham.co.uk
(January 30, 2008)
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