Formulaic grist to Grisham mill

The Street Lawyer by John Grisham, Doubleday/Century, $280 I can't recall feeling such a deep sense of embarrassment while reading a book since my father caught me reading The Diaries of Anais Nin as a young teenager.

I tried to hide it under a newspaper but in my haste it dropped to the floor with a thud and the game was up. He just smiled and encouraged me to read on. It was, after all, something of a classic.

I can now imagine hordes of people on their way to work peering into newspapers inside which John Grisham's latest novel is hidden from view - each reader desperate not to be exposed as a follower of the author, and associated with all the superficiality and repetition that has now become his hallmark.

This latest offering is about a lawyer with a conscience, about greed, justice, right and wrong, blah, blah, blah . . .

It seems almost idiotic to knock Grisham, the lawyer-turned-writer, whose eight previous books have sold millions and made him millions.

Such is their popularity that most have been made into films.

I suspect, however, that if Grisham sells the rights to The Street Lawyer - which he has, thankfully, suggested he might not - it would need such a re-write to make it interesting that it would be barely recognisable.

Spliced into the usual Grisham-type plot is an attempt to explore the social ill of homelessness. Unfortunately, Grisham doesn't have the skill, or the inclination, to get either to the bottom of the issue or under the skin of his characters.

For what it's worth, Michael Brock is a bright 32-year-old antitrust lawyer in Washington DC, working for one of America's largest law firms, and three years from becoming a partner, with all the financial security and prestige that would bring.

His world is turned upside-down by a homeless man called Mister who takes Brock and colleagues hostage in their offices, threatening to kill them with a bomb strapped to his waist.

The lawyers survive but the assailant is killed, taking with him the reason for the encounter but leaving enough clues to provide the basis for a Grisham mystery.

A traumatised Brock seeks help from a ramshackle legal clinic which assists with the homeless, and so finds himself on a career path he could never have expected - much like Grisham, only in the opposite direction.

Brock's firm, it emerges, was involved in the illegal eviction of Mister and others who were thrown on to the street where one family perished in the bitter winter.

With a sudden show of conscience, caught between naughty, rich lawyers and poor, homeless, black street people, the stage is set for good against bad, big against small, white against black, and ultimately - this is set in Washington after all - the little people against the system.

Grisham's characters remain shallow despite his going through the motions of an attempt to give them depth.

It is as if the book was written around a few central pages in which Brock gets the run-down from a clinic lawyer - aka Grisham - about the political causes of homelessness and how it would all be much better if, well, the world was just a better place.

While Grisham has at least tried to use his popularity to bring an important social issue to the fore, whatever sense of new-found purpose he might have had when setting out to write the book is lost as the story moves along a very well-trodden Grisham path.

Perhaps a clue as to why this is lies in the author's note of thanks. Though he talks of trips around Washington, 'Jonathan Hamilton did the research', Grisham writes. A pity Mr Hamilton didn't write the book.