Gray Mountain

Gray Mountain – by John Grisham

If you’ve already read several of John Grisham’s previous books, you’ve essentially already this one as well – before you even pick it up.  Grisham’s books seem to have very common themes that run through most of them, in addition to always focusing around the law and lawyers.  Let’s see what this book includes:

1. The “Professional Lawyers are Always Miserable” story.  People who want to make it big in the legal profession find themselves, upon graduating from law school, working in faceless, lifeless firms that only care about how many hours that the young peons can bill.  Our young up and comers are forced to work 100+ hour weeks, sleep in their office, have no time for a social life, and seem to rely on Pepto-Bismol as a main dietary supplement.  I guess there are still people in the world that would rather make boatloads of money, even if means sacrificing everything – including happiness and selling their soul.
2. The “Small Town” story.  Usually we find ourselves in some small, remote, rural area of a town that has definitely seen better days and appears to be a couple of months from extinction.  Everyone knows who the barber is, the waitress (at the only restaurant) is, and the name of the funeral director, but there’s no McDonalds nor shopping mall in sight.  People, sadly, are born and raised in this town and seem to know of no other life outside the town boundaries.  Life is a far cry from anything that Norman Rockwell ever painted.
3. The “Big Corporations are Always Evil” story.  There is some pour soul, or souls, who are victims of the high and mighty greedy companies that are much more interested in making a profit that they are the wellbeing of people or the planet.  Usually, this evil entity is represented by something like a billion dollar heartless insurance firm, or a company producing mass quantities of cancer causing chemicals that seep into the environment causing the slow death of the surrounding communities.  Usually, we’re then introduced to a young eager lawyer who goes against all odds to bring justice for the under privileged victims.

So in this book, Samantha Kofer is a young attorney working in midtown Manhattan enjoying the “perks” of working for a high profile firm.  She makes gobs of money, yet doesn’t have any life whatsoever that involves anything remotely tied to enjoyment.  Well, the story takes place in 2008, and the financial meltdown is slowly starting to take effect.  Every lawyer she knows, not just at her firm, is being laid off left and right.  There seems to be absolutely no hope for these young urban professionals – they go from riches to rags overnight.  Eventually, Samantha gets a pink slip as well.

Well, fortunately (kind of) at her firm, she is offered a furlough opportunity of working in a charitable organization for one year without pay.  If things get better at her firm, she may get to come back to her job.  Will she do it?  She better hurry up and decide, as these opportunities are rare, and she’s actually one of the lucky ones to get such an offer.

So Samantha heads to a small town in the middle of nowhere in West Virginia to work giving free legal assistance at a legal clinic.  She now, essentially, sees how the other half lives.  There’s all sorts of small town problems, and Samantha is quickly thrown into the thick of things.  Fortunately, she has a good team, so she’s never completely overwhelmed.

The biggest monster she faces is the coal industry.  The big bad coal company is doing something called “strip mining”, and Samantha (as well as the reader) learns all about the process.  Essentially, the West Virginia mountains are being raped, and people are literally dying after prolonged exposure from working in these mines their whole lives.  Sadly, it doesn’t seem there’s anything that can be done.  The coal company isn’t doing anything illegal, and after all, people need coal for electricity.  Plus, when you live in a small town in West Virginia, there really aren’t many other opportunities as far as employment goes.

The problem that many have with this novel, is this really isn’t a linear story.  Although sometimes we’re given small hints, there’s never a big “showdown” between the good guys and the bad guys.  There’s no major trial, no biased judge, no tilted jury selection, no major headlines, nothing that we get used to from reading John Grisham.  This book, rather, is simply about Samantha, not about a particular lawsuit.  This didn’t bother me at all because a) as I mentioned, I’ve already seen this story before with Grisham – and- b) Grisham is a great story teller.  So even though you could argue that nothing concrete happens in terms of a plot, I still enjoyed reading about Samantha, and her struggles with her new existence.

Because of this, I’m not sure they could ever make a movie about this book, but it would make an excellent pilot for a television series.  This book didn’t blow me away by Grisham standards, but most everything by Grisham is better than most anything else by anyone else, so I still enjoyed it.  Even if I felt like I had read all of this before.