Sycamore Row by John Grisham (Book Review by Bob Racine

                         Published by Random House, 2013

After each reading of a John Grisham novel, I feel as if I have learned more about the law and the justice system in our country than any textbook or crash course for non-schooled adults could possibly teach me, and his latest work is no exception.  In fact, it is the most revealing I have ever taken the time to absorb, it being the ninth of his writings I have checked out.  As many of us know, Grisham is himself a lawyer.  When you follow the intricacies of any suspenseful plot he devises, you can rest assured that you are getting an accurate and authentic portrayal of how the court system operates.  His stories may be fictional, but they are not fanciful.  I suppose you can call Grisham’s books legal thrillers.  The devices of his principal characters in their struggles for justice and rectitude and legitimacy do not consist of firearms or martial arts or implements of cloak and dagger.  The system of jurisprudence itself is both the means of embattlement and the arena in which the embattlement occurs.  There are no white knights or flawless role models or Perry Mason-style practitioners.  All the persons he depicts are deeply flawed.  Some drink to excess and/or smoke to excess and/or bend the rules almost to the breaking point; all make mistakes, sometimes whoppers.  No one is lily white, not even the main character, Jake Brigance.

Do any of you Grisham fans recognize the name?  Jake put in his first appearance in the author’s first novel, “A Time to Kill.”  In that earlier work he is a trial lawyer in Ford County, Mississippi (fictitious of course) in 1985 defending a black man against a murder charge for killing the two white men who raped his daughter.  That was three years before the time setting of “Sycamore Row,” in which the litigation is not a murder trial but a contest over the legitimacy of a will handwritten by a man named Seth Hubbard just before he hangs himself from a sycamore tree.  It seems Seth has done something very odd and heretofore unheard of.  He has bequeathed 90% of a 24-plus-million dollar estate not to his two grown middle-aged children, but to his black housekeeper named Lettie.  In a death note that reaches Jake’s hands after the suicide has already taken place, Hubbard predicts that his relatives, all of whom he despises, completely cut out of the inheritance, will be greedily contesting its terms but urges Jake, whom Seth has chosen, to fight them all the way.  Lettie must prevail.  What complicates these seemingly clear instructions is the fact that over a year beforehand he made out an earlier one dividing his fortune between all of his offspring and their children, one that this new one is supposed to nullify completely.  Jake is faced with the task of serving the wishes of a man he has never met or seen in the flesh and proving that the second will is valid.    

The book has some length, quite a number of characters, and much of it portrays the maneuverings of the attorneys on both sides of the aisle.  The reader knows well ahead what each of them is up to and something about how they are plotting to establish that Seth either was or was not of sound enough mind to compose such a holographic document and only a day before he dispatched himself.  What seems at first a rather simple affair for Jake compared with the sensational murder trial of three years before is beset by complications piling one on top of the other until the outcome appears to be anything but a slam dunk. 

Jake is up against more than the greed of Seth’s relatives; there is chicanery right and left on the part of the lawyers for the family and Jake himself is not above a little maneuvering of his own.  In short, he needs the fees after a very dry season.  Over those previous three years business has been very sparse and because the Ku Klux Klan protested his defending a black person by burning down the house he and his wife Carla owned, he lost all his equity and has been renting a shabby small abode.  This will probate that has fallen into his hands promises to deliver him and his family from the financial doldrums, but there are rocks and shoals around which he must navigate.      

The stage is set for a marathon fight in the same courtroom where “A Time to Kill” takes place.  But the fight is entangled in many questions that no one including Jake can answer.   Why would a millionaire leave 90% of his assets to a housekeeper, something unheard of in a deep south community?  What influenced his decision?  The man was dying of cancer and in wretched pain.  Was his mind beclouded by the Demerol he was taking in such large quantities?  Did he really hate his children that much?  Did Lettie, who cared for him in the closing hours of his life and nursed him on his deathbed, use some feminine wiles to induce him into leaving her such an astronomical sum, one that no black person in the state owns or has ever owned?  What came over Seth?  And what dark secret out of Lettie’s past lurks in the shadows?  It is that dark secret, hidden even from her, that eventually breaks the case wide open.

The legal trajectory that slowly leads to the final courtroom confrontation I found absolutely enthralling.  It is perhaps unsettling for many readers to learn how so many rules governing jurisprudence are honored as much in the breach as in the observance, even by judges on the bench.  Consider these observations either from or about his characters that Grisham drops along the way: “[Legal] ethics are determined by what they catch you doing;”  “He was well versed in the ethics of his profession when they could be beneficial, otherwise he ignored them;”  “Trials are not about fairness – trials are about winning.”  The most fascinating of all is the sleight of hand by which the lawyers influence the selection of the jury.  (Of course, Grisham deals at even greater length with that subject in “The Runaway Jury,” one of the most exciting of his earlier works.)      

There are many and varied moving scenes depicted in this book.  Seth’s funeral gives new coloration to the term tragicomic.  Droves in attendance but no one present to grieve, only to keep up appearances with money on their minds or, as in the case of the county sheriff, to perform a duty and cover the scene.  Jake’s many off-the-record conversations with the judge are potent and most revealing about the delicate and slippery side of practicing law.  There is a very heartwarming sequence in which Grisham visits the Brigance household (including a 7-year-old daughter) on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning.  There are conversations between husband and wife pertaining to the lifestyle forced upon them by Jake’s practice.  There is a subplot pertaining to Lettie’s drunkard husband and her wish to be free from him, one that ends quite tragically for him and for two innocent victims of vehicular homicide and almost puts a stain on Lettie’s reputation, something under these circumstances she does not need.  

All through the circuitous but well integrated narrative, we can pick up the sound and the rhythm of jackals circling their prey and with an appetite for conquest, and over against all this fury is the simple private person of Lettie reluctantly participating and apparently helpless against the onslaught and the front page publicity.  Even members of her extended family, whom she barely knows, come flocking around her hoping for a windfall from the expected inheritance.  In an area like Ford County, what are the chances of an unprecedented probate trial such as this grinding on without the issue of race raising its ugly head?  What are her chances up against the machinations of professional white attorneys eager to keep the money in white hands and collect handsomely themselves off a protracted litigation?  And whose hands can Lettie hold while the storm rages on?  One sentence in the novel sums up the crucial question: “After all the witnesses had testified, after all the lawyers had been silenced, after all the wise words had been uttered . . . could those [jurors] (ten of whom are white) reach deep and find the courage to uphold Seth’s will?”

5% of the fortune has been left to Seth’s local church and the other 5% to his brother Ancil, whose whereabouts are at first unknown and whom he has not seen or heard from in decades.  Without giving away the outcome of this tense narrative, I will simply say that Ancil, whom nobody is thinking about during the course of the proceedings, gets to deliver the stunning blow that tears the lid off the county’s shameful past.  The closing chapters of “Sycamore Row” had me in cathartic tears.  The heartfelt truth finally has the last, unwanted but cleansing word. 

Recommended for serious and probing adult readers with socio-political conscience and awareness!

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.