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When he steps outside his usual formula (feisty young attorney battles corrupt law firm/insurance company/government agency), John Grisham often achieves something singular.
It has been more than 25 years since“A Time to Kill,” his shattering first novel that didn’t find its audience until the publication of “The Firm,” his first popular work.
From that time, Grisham has rarely disappointed, but admirers of that first, almost personal, novel had wanted another.
In 2013, “Sycamore Row”became that book, a continuation of the story of Jake Brigance of the author’s first novel.
“The Reckoning,” Grisham’s new book, has resonances from those novels, though it is set four decades before both. The new novel is set in the 1940s in the same sleepy Mississippi town where Jake Brigance successfully defended Carl Lee Hailey, the black man accused of murdering the white men who attacked his young daughter.
It is late fall 1946 in “The Reckoning” when World War II hero and prominent farmer Pete Banning walks into the office of the Methodist church in his hometown of Clanton, Miss.
He pulls out a loaded Colt .45 — one he brought back from a war raid on Japanese planes — aims it at his pastor and friend Dexter Bell, and kills the reverend while he is at his desk working on his weekly sermon.
Why did Pete commit the murder? Did it have anything to do with the closeness that seemed to develop between Dexter and Liza, Pete’s wife, while Pete was away at war? Did that closeness become an affair?
How will this news affect Liza, whom Pete recently has had committed to the state insane asylum? Will the state of Mississippi convict a war hero of murder?
Why did Pete deed the Banning land over to his children, Joel and Stella, a few weeks before the murder? Doesn’t that prove premeditation? What impact will that obvious legal maneuver have on the adjacent land owned by Pete’s sister Florry?
Pete’s reply to any of those questions is a stolid, “I have nothing to say.”
All of this seems to indicate that John Grisham has embraced the traditions of his Southern literary forebears. There are more than a few echoes of the works of William Faulkner. (In fact, Faulkner makes an actual appearance near the novel’s end.)
Like “All the King’s Men,” the timeless Southern benchmark from Robert Penn Warren, “The Reckoning” is very much about how the sins of the past beget the sins of the present.
Grisham attempts a great deal in his new work. Emulating Faulkner and Warren is certainly a lot for any novel to attempt. Add to that Grisham’s skill at bringing the contemporary legal thriller to life. He even serves up two courtroom trials, which serve as bookends for the novel.
He attempts even more, though. Between those trials is a meticulously researched recounting of the Bataan Death March and its aftermath, which is intended to reveal much about who Pete Banning is and who he becomes.
Too often, however, that middle section — fascinating though it is — tends towards reporting rather than becoming a real part of the novel.
But at least John Grisham remains bemused by the logic and illogic of Mississippi law in particular and Southern culture in general. He is one of the true contemporary masters at examining both.
That he has linked his concerns to those of the literary masters who preceded him, writers like Faulkner and Warren, is part of the success of “The Reckoning.” It is part of coming to know Southern truth, even as Joel Banning says late in the novel, “Hearing that truth is like grabbing at smoke in our family.”
Steven Whitton is a retired Professor of English.
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