There are two kinds of novelists, the ones who like to point out how we're all alike, and the ones who like to point out how we're all different.
John Grisham definitely gets a kick out of showing us how we're all part of one herd called the human herd. In his novel, Sycamore Row, he predicates the appeal of his novel based on an all-out courtroom battle waged by relatives of a newly deceased multi-millionaire businessman who are determined to inherit his estate.
It's unfortunate that the wealthy character whose name is Seth Hubbard, didn't leave his estate to them in the latest version of his will which he wrote and dated the day before he died.
Seth's relatives, the relatively normal, upper-middle class, educated white Southerners, soon learn that they're about to inherit nothing.
The story revolves around their indignation and disappointment when they learn the single person who will be inheriting Seth Hubbard's entire estate is Seth Hubbard's former housekeeper, Lettie Lang.
If you've read John Grisham novels, you know many of them take place in the rural South, in a fictional place called Clanton, Mississippi. And I'll bet you can already guess that this former housekeeper who's about to inherit Seth Hubbard's entire estate is African-American. Don't be surprised when the white residents of Clanton get all bent out of shape by the prospect of having an African-American multimillionaire living among them.
Setting aside for a moment the well documented mores and customs of the rural South, I wonder why anyone would want to sign up to read a novel about relatively well-off white people motivated by greed acting badly. But you see? That's the appeal of reading a novelist who actively wants to posit that all people have the capacity to act equally as badly when visions of inherited sugarplums are yanked away just before they appear.
John Grisham relishes dramatizing a family that's about to take part in a "legal brawl" in hopes of inheriting millions. That's what you get reading an author who loves to point out how we're all alike. When I look at the human race as I think Grisham does, I have to admit, maybe we are alike: We're limited. We're ignorant. We're deficient. We fall short. We fail. We fight until we forget what we've been fighting for.
Now posit that kind of novel against the opposite kind where the author loves to point out how we're all different, let's say for the sake of argument, Anthony Doerr's Cloud Atlas or Amor Towel's Lincoln Highway. Although many would call both novels literary—and maybe they are—with every page we read in those stories, we find the characters themselves turning, by which I mean they're either revealing themselves or maturing, or at least changing as people before our eyes which gives those authors trmendous opportunity to have us as readers feel wonder, surprise or a sense of adventure with every turn of the page.
Well, that's my theory. When you start with human limitation (we're all alike) as your moral construct, the world looks like a far more bleak and colorless place. Sure there are entertaining high jinks. Sure there's courtroom drama. But I'd opt for wonder, surprise or adventure any day, wouldn't you?
Next month: More about Sycamore Row—what works and what doesn't
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