The Firm – John Grisham, 1991 ★★½

Reconsidering John Grisham's Big Debut

The archetypical thriller of its day, The Firm offers a fascinating glimpse at an era defined in our rear view by caviar dreams and corded telephony. Though less gripping as a thriller, it still presents a terrific premise and a first hundred pages reminiscent of Frederick Forsyth.

Is there such a thing as being too clever for one’s own good? Meet Mitchell Y. McDeere. A top student at Harvard Law School, Mitch is recruited hard by a Memphis law firm, Bendini, Lambert & Locke.

Mitch hasn’t heard of the firm, a result of their deliberately low profile. As tax lawyers, they serve a high-end clientele who prefer discretion in matters legal and otherwise. Senior partner Oliver Lambert makes Mitch an offer he can’t refuse:

“A base salary of eighty thousand the first year, plus bonuses. Eighty-five the second year, plus bonuses. A low-interest mortgage so you can buy a home. Two country club memberships. And a new BMW. You pick the color, of course.”

While Mitch can use the money, the car clinches it. Its magic as an attention-getting device extended to publicity around John Grisham’s first-ever bestseller that would become a hit Tom Cruise movie two years later. Almost three decades on, Grisham remains a household name, and The Firm probably his best-known work.

I remember talking the novel up to one lawyer at a sleepaway-camp reunion, back when it seemed clever to ask young lawyers what color Beemer they got to join their firm.

“A car!” he exclaimed. “You know what I got the day I joined my firm? They bought me lunch.”

Beware of lawyers bearing gifts. Mitch discovers Bendini, Lambert & Locke has reason for a low profile. They work for shady people, and employ underhanded means to keep their own in line. Soon after Mitch’s suspicions are raised, he has an encounter at a luncheonette with an agent from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He is warned his life is in danger. What to do? Who to trust?

It’s a intriguing kickoff which Grisham, at the time a practicing lawyer pursuing fiction as a sideline, develops with vigor and wit. The posh environs of his office gradually take on an aspect of a tiled battleground as the Bendini partners, in closed-door meetings, wonder about Mitch’s loyalty and what he knows.

Gene Hackman and Tom Cruise in the 1993 film adaptation of The Firm. Hackman's character is a mentor of Mitch in both the novel and the film; in the movie he is considerably more empathetic. It is one of several changes for the better. Image from http://www.theaceblackblog.com/2012/02/movie-review-firm-1993.html.

They bug his house, his office, his car. It’s the 1980s, so they can’t track him by drone, or eavesdrop on his calls when he uses a pay phone. But they have money, reach, and ruthlessness. One detective Mitch hires lasts long enough to warn him that five lawyers who worked for the Bendini firm all died in highly suspicious ways. “It’s a dangerous place to work,” he tells Mitch. Then he gets murdered, too.

Meanwhile, the FBI gets butter fingers when it comes to bringing Mitch aboard. They warn him he has no one else to trust, but fumble an early meet. Mitch, distrustful of authority, sees them as part of the problem.

There is a sense early on in Grisham’s portrayal of Mitch that he might be too cocky, as when he takes in his new fellow associates at Bendini:

Nothing bold or nonconforming. Maybe a couple of bow ties, but nothing more daring. Neatness was mandatory. No beards, mustaches or hair over the ears. There were a couple of wimps, but good looks dominated.

Did you catch that? Maybe it’s just me, but a whiff of superciliousness hangs over Mitch, an air, not of privilege (Mitch comes from the wrong side of the tracks, we are told early and reminded often), but of superiority based on nothing deeper than appearance.

After reading that, I wondered if Grisham was doing this intentionally, or just reflecting an inherent bias of a smart, good-looking guy.

The more I read The Firm, the more I went back and forth. It clearly has an agenda of taking on the ethos of the decade it was conceived and written, the greed-is-good 1980s. Everything about the Bendini law firm emphasizes the ruination of crassly materialist pursuits.

As Mitch is sucked into the firm, his wife Abby is told by a colleague’s wife that being a work widow should be accepted as part of the deal:

“You must understand that your husband and my husband are both very good lawyers, but they could not earn this kind of money anywhere else. And you and I would be driving new Buicks instead of new Peugeots and Mercedes-Benzes.”

[Spoiler Alert] If there is a comic undertow to The Firm, it is in the idea of amoral careerists and enabling spouses slowly learning they are in business with the devil. We discover Bendini is not just a sweat shop servicing lawbreakers, but a wholly owned subsidiary of the Morolto crime family out of Chicago. “It’s Mafia, Mitch, and illegal as hell,” is how it is explained by no less than the FBI Director. He tells Mitch he can either help bring Bendini down or join them behind bars. But the FBI is out to entice Mitch to deliver the goods they want, even if it costs Mitch’s life. So call them amoral greedheads, too.

You can see Mitch himself fitting into that culture. He not only takes the job on the basis of that gold-plated initial offer, but as events unfold works very hard to make sure he profits from playing ball with the Feds. He sets a price of $2 million for his cooperation, then connives to add to that bundle. Clearly the guy has an attitude and likes money. It made me think more and more that Grisham was making a social comment.

Then came the novel’s second half. That’s where The Firm shifts gears from intricately-plotted mystery to man-versus-the-system adventure yarn, and Mitch goes from victim to lone-wolf superhero, fixing everything largely out of the reader’s view while keeping his Bendini bosses in the dark. The main FBI agent who has been contacting Mitch now finds himself contacted by Mitch’s wife Abby, herself morphed from worrying housewife into a slick conduit for Mitch’s plans.

“There is something you need to always remember,” Abby tells the agent. “He’s much smarter than you are.”

This smugness becomes suffocating, drowning what had been a tense thriller with an aura of inevitability. Mitch becomes someone who can do no wrong, a Mary Sue by the parlance of another day. What started out a surreal slice of life descends into a routine thriller windup. By book’s end, the once-sly Bendinis and their Morolto handlers have been reduced into Keystone thugs, chasing Mitch and his friends across Florida in a fashion so clumsily it sparks the following exchange:

“You think they’re Moroltos or Fibbies [FBI agents]?”

“Well, if they’re idiots, they could be either one.”

The Firm sold millions of copies and made Grisham a household name, so I can’t be too hard on it, but the way it wraps up so lacks for craft considering how it began that it feels like the work of another writer. Certainly it feels like the product of another decade, the 1990s, where pop fiction had a sleeker, more reductivist orientation.

Author John Grisham. According to Wikipedia, his books have sold over 275 million copies. While not his first published novel (that being A Time To Kill), The Firm was his first best-seller and launched his career. Image from http://www.oxfordeagle.com/2017/06/18/grisham-looking-forward-to-returning-to-oxford/.

Anyway, I know it’s not just for me that the end rang hollow. The Tom Cruise movie adaptation made two years later changed Mitch up considerably, ironically to make him a bit less of a Tom Cruise-like hero. There comes a point where reading about Mitch’s 18-hour workdays, drafting flawless legal drafts on the fly, and speaking Spanish becomes exhausting. It gets to a point where Mitch can escape two manhunts while simultaneously preparing a 1,500-part legal case against his former employers with purloined paperwork that fills an entire hotel room, and you accept it as par for the course.

The Firm had the makings of greatness. In the way it sets up Mitch’s conundrum of a highly-demanding workplace where everything he sees and everyone he answers to may not be on the up-and-up, it captures a marvelously rich quality of workplace paranoia, of dread regarding the real ethical sacrifices it takes to be a successful lawyer, or any other kind of professional, then or now. One Bendini associate tells Mitch early on:

“When you were in law school you had some noble idea of what a lawyer should be. A champion of individual rights; a defender of the Constitution; a guardian of the oppressed; an advocate for your client’s principles. Then after you practice for six months you realize we’re nothing more than hired guns… Nothing shocks you. It’s supposed to be an honorable profession, but you’ll meet so many crooked lawyers you’ll want to quit and find an honest job.”

This would connect better if the rest of the story didn’t push the villain angle quite so hard. If there were lawyers at Bendini who merely bent rules, rather than wantonly broke them for the scum of society, it might render Mitch’s plight more multi-dimensional, a question not just of how Mitch could turn on his buddies, but whether in fact he should.

Instead, Bendini puts the screws to Mitch so hard they give him no choice. No sooner do they begin to suspect him of resenting this then they decide to kill him, just to be safe, never mind the fact he has quickly become their Golden Boy of billable hours. After that, the story devolves into a simpler matter of escape. The problem is that it never develops into much of an escape story. What you get is more like a metaphor to nowhere where a clever premise sticks with you long after the rest of the story fades from memory.