The Appeal by John Grisham

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The Appeal

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The Appeal
Author	John Grisham
Cover artist	John Fontana Shasti O'Leary Soudant
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Legal thriller
Publisher	Doubleday
Publication date	January 29, 2008
Media type	Print (Hardcover)
Pages	384 pages
ISBN	0-385-51504-7

The Appeal is a 2008 novel by John Grisham, his twenty-first book and his first fictional legal thriller since The Broker was published in 2005. It was published by Doubleday and released in hardcover in the United States on January 29, 2008. A paperback edition was released by Delta Publishing on November 18, 2008.

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 Plot

Mississippi attorneys Wes and Mary Grace Payton have battled New York City-based Krane Chemical in an effort to seek justice for their client Jeannette Baker, who lost her husband and young son to cancer likely caused by carcinogenic pollutants the company knowingly and negligently allowed to seep into the town of Bowmore's water supply. When the jury awards the plaintiff $3 million in wrongful death damages and $38 million in punitive damages, billionaire CEO Carl Trudeau vows to do whatever is necessary to overturn their decision.

Since Mississippi Supreme Court justices are elected rather than appointed, Trudeau colludes with Barry Rinehart of Troy-Hogan, a Boca Raton firm that specializes in elections, to select a candidate who can defeat Sheila McCarthy, known for her tendency to side with the underdog. Their choice is Ron Fisk, a lawyer with no prior political experience or ambitions. He is naive enough to be impressed by all the attention shown him by his backers and not question the source of the considerable funds pouring into his coffers or the underhanded tactics used by his campaign team. Also thrown into the ring by Rinehart is heavy-drinking gambler Clete Coley, a clownish rogue third candidate designed to draw support away from McCarthy and then cede it to Fisk when he eventually withdraws from the race.

Fisk defeats McCarthy and immediately adopts the position expected of him. He votes against upholding several large settlements in cases brought before the court on appeal, and the Paytons expect he will do the same when their case comes up for review. What they don't anticipate is Fisk unexpectedly being forced to rethink his stand when his son is seriously injured by a defective product and left permanently impaired by a medical error and the issue of corporate responsibility affects him and his family on a personal level.

Background

Grisham's plot closely resembles a real-life decade-long legal battle between West Virginia coal mining competitors. When Don Blankenship, chairman and CEO of A.T. Massey Coal, lost a $50 million verdict in a fraud lawsuit brought by Hugh Caperton and Harman Mining over the cancellation of a long-term coal contract, he contributed $3 million to help Charleston lawyer Brent Benjamin unseat incumbent Judge Warren McGraw. Benjamin won the election, and three years later, when Massey's appeal reached the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, Caperton's lawyers asked him to recuse himself because of Blankenship's financial support. Benjamin declined and he cast the crucial vote needed to overturn the verdict favoring Caperton. Among those who noticed similarities between the case and The Appeal was former West Virginia justice Larry Starcher, who criticized Benjamin for not disqualifying himself. He wrote in an opinion, "I believe John Grisham got it right when he said that he simply had to read The Charleston Gazette to get an idea for his next novel."^[1]

In June 2009, the United States Supreme Court ruled that Justice Benjamin should have recused himself in Caperton v. Massey, sending the case back to the West Virginia Supreme Court. Writing for the majority in the 5 to 4 decision, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy called the appearance of conflict of interest so "extreme" that the failure to recuse constituted a threat to the plaintiff’s Constitutional right to due process under the Fourteenth Amendment. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.'s dissent warned that the United States Supreme Court majority decision would have dire consequences for "public confidence in judicial impartiality."^[2]

Only a minority of states elect judges directly, a controversial system virtually unknown outside the United States. The Appeal has been seen as an attack on this system of selecting judges, since judges have a conflict of interest when ruling on cases involving major campaign contributors.^[3][4]

 Critical reception

Janet Maslin of the New York Times observed, "Building a remarkable degree of suspense into the all too familiar ploys described here, Mr. Grisham delivers his savviest book in years. His extended vacation from hard-hitting fiction is over. However passionately he cared about the nonfiction events he described in An Innocent Man, his strong suit remains bluntly manipulative, no-frills storytelling, the kind that brings out his great skill as a puppeteer. It barely matters that the characters in The Appeal are essentially stick figures. What works for Mr. Grisham is his patient, lawyerly, inexorable way of dramatizing urgent moral issues." ^[5]

Chuck Leddy of the Boston Globe called the book "a novel that could become its own era-defining classic" and "an entertaining page-turner that, by showing readers a perversion of the system, yearns for justice." He added, "Who knew that the mega-best-selling Grisham wanted to be a moralist, a sort of Old Testament prophet fulminating against our sins? In The Appeal, he pulls that off beautifully." ^[6]

Tim Rutten of the Houston Chronicle said the novel is "as angry, dark and urgent a piece of social realism as you're likely to find on the best-seller lists any time soon. Further, in this presidential election year, it's a far more blunt, accurate and plain-spoken indictment of our contemporary political system's real failings than you're likely to find anywhere on the nonfiction lists." He continued, "It's a fascinating narrative, filled with deadly accurate characterizations by an author who knows both the law and politics from the inside. The problem, as with all Grisham's fiction, is that it's egregiously written . . . work that observes none of the conventions of traditional literary narrative. Characters arrive as if spawned from the head of Zeus, fully formed and unchanged by anything that transpires in the course of the story's unfolding . . . Meanwhile, pronouns float through his prose with indeterminate antecedents, and the plot clanks from point to point. The influences are to be found not in literature but in the cinema, and more recently video games . . . The Appeal is basically agitprop — agitprop in a couple of good causes, but agitprop nonetheless." ^[7]

References

1. ^ USA Today, February 16, 2009
2. ^ New York Times, June 9, 2009
3. ^ Joan Biskupic, "Supreme Court case with the feel of a best seller," USA Today, February 16, 2009
4. ^ Adam Liptak, "Rendering Justice, With One Eye on Re-election," New York Times, May 25, 2009
5. ^ New York Times review
6. ^ Boston Globe review
7. ^ Houston Chronicle review

External links

• Online excerpt from The Appeal

Preceded by Playing for Pizza

John Grisham Novels 2008

Succeeded by The Associate

Works by John Grisham
Legal fiction	A Time to Kill (1989) · The Firm (1991) · The Pelican Brief (1992) · The Client (1993) · The Chamber (1994) · The Rainmaker (1995) · The Runaway Jury (1996) · The Partner (1997) · The Gingerbread Man (unpublished) (1998) · The Street Lawyer (1998) · The Testament (1999) · The Brethren (2000) · The Summons (2002) · The King of Torts (2003) · The Last Juror (2004) · The Broker (2005) · The Appeal (2008) · The Associate (2009) · Ford County (2009)
Non-legal fiction	A Painted House (2001) · Skipping Christmas (2001) · Bleachers (2003) · Mickey (screenplay) (2004) · Playing for Pizza (2007) ·
Non-fiction	The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town (2006)
Film adaptations	The Firm (1993) · The Pelican Brief (1993) · The Client (1994) · A Time to Kill (1996) · The Chamber (1996) · The Rainmaker (1997) · The Gingerbread Man (1998) · A Painted House (2003) · Runaway Jury (2003) · Christmas with the Kranks (2004) · The Associate (2012)

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Categories: 2008 novels | Legal thriller novels | Novels by John Grisham