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John Grisham has a curious way of drawing out courtroom fact, dramatic fiction, and credible dialog among compelling characters into entertaining legal page-turners. Unfortunately, Grisham's 1997 "The Partner" pulls together these elements among an only marginally interesting core of characters, all revolving around the capture and peculiar justice visited upon a presumed-dead partner in a Biloxi, Mississippi law firm.
"The Partner" focuses on Patrick Lanigan, an attorney who fakes his own death, heists $90 million from his law firm, and skips the country. After four years on the run, he's caught, and returned to the States presumably to face the consequences for his actions, yet he returns too prepared. Grisham works hard to make Lanigan into a sympathetic character, but the result leaves the reader among a bevy of characters that range from the irrelevant to the downright unpleasant, woven together by a narrative that slides too often into the tedious. One could almost argue that Grisham, amid writing "The Partner," realized Lanigan's one-dimensional, only marginally likable nature, and supplanted the novel with other, more sympathetic characters to compensate.
As the novel's central character, Lanigan is the one on whom the entire story pivots. We must find a reason to care about what happens to him, yet the plot reveals a so thoroughly calculated character that we discover little of what happens to be much of a surprise. As a result, the character study becomes secondary to an exposition of the mechanics of a grand scam, with the drama and conflict virtually non-existent. The rest of "The Partner" borders on filler; attorneys talking to attorneys, investigators probing suspects, with seemingly every character holding a limitless supply of "secret files" on everyone else. While the material fills in the necessary blanks, the reader realizes there was no moral epiphany, no shocking surprise, no resonating arc that allows the "blanks" to make sense. Blanks, to be sure, are filled - but that's all.
Contrasted against stories with much more richly drawn characters, such as Grisham's classic "The Firm," "The Partner" leaves the reader barely interested in how its main character acts. Most of Lanigan's life decisions are viewed only in retrospect, his conflicts viewed in the narrative as having been resolved outside the timespan of the novel's reality. We see only end-game. A more compelling version of "The Partner" could have been written in a story chronicling the meticulous planning of his original disappearance, and the detail behind the motivations that drove it. In a way, "The Partner" is a story about a novel not written.
Those who have read "The Partner" surely know its final page twist that presumably serves as the ultimate ironic end game for Lanigan's character. We won't go into that ending here, but it is safe to say that very ending is so departed from the way Grisham has drawn the particular characters involved that the shock of the twist is quickly offset by the realization of its own absurdity.
"The Partner" isn't a wholly bad Grisham novel; it contains the requisite complex plotting and the attention to legal details that pay homage to his tradition in the genre. The disappointment comes in the realization that, once the final page is turned, the drama, tension, and intrigue that have made his prior works so compelling are simply non-existent. With its focus on a story told almost entirely in retrospect if not flashback, and its odd last-page twist, "The Partner" cannot help but be termed a disappointment.
"The Partner" focuses on Patrick Lanigan, an attorney who fakes his own death, heists $90 million from his law firm, and skips the country. After four years on the run, he's caught, and returned to the States presumably to face the consequences for his actions, yet he returns too prepared. Grisham works hard to make Lanigan into a sympathetic character, but the result leaves the reader among a bevy of characters that range from the irrelevant to the downright unpleasant, woven together by a narrative that slides too often into the tedious. One could almost argue that Grisham, amid writing "The Partner," realized Lanigan's one-dimensional, only marginally likable nature, and supplanted the novel with other, more sympathetic characters to compensate.
As the novel's central character, Lanigan is the one on whom the entire story pivots. We must find a reason to care about what happens to him, yet the plot reveals a so thoroughly calculated character that we discover little of what happens to be much of a surprise. As a result, the character study becomes secondary to an exposition of the mechanics of a grand scam, with the drama and conflict virtually non-existent. The rest of "The Partner" borders on filler; attorneys talking to attorneys, investigators probing suspects, with seemingly every character holding a limitless supply of "secret files" on everyone else. While the material fills in the necessary blanks, the reader realizes there was no moral epiphany, no shocking surprise, no resonating arc that allows the "blanks" to make sense. Blanks, to be sure, are filled - but that's all.
Contrasted against stories with much more richly drawn characters, such as Grisham's classic "The Firm," "The Partner" leaves the reader barely interested in how its main character acts. Most of Lanigan's life decisions are viewed only in retrospect, his conflicts viewed in the narrative as having been resolved outside the timespan of the novel's reality. We see only end-game. A more compelling version of "The Partner" could have been written in a story chronicling the meticulous planning of his original disappearance, and the detail behind the motivations that drove it. In a way, "The Partner" is a story about a novel not written.
Those who have read "The Partner" surely know its final page twist that presumably serves as the ultimate ironic end game for Lanigan's character. We won't go into that ending here, but it is safe to say that very ending is so departed from the way Grisham has drawn the particular characters involved that the shock of the twist is quickly offset by the realization of its own absurdity.
"The Partner" isn't a wholly bad Grisham novel; it contains the requisite complex plotting and the attention to legal details that pay homage to his tradition in the genre. The disappointment comes in the realization that, once the final page is turned, the drama, tension, and intrigue that have made his prior works so compelling are simply non-existent. With its focus on a story told almost entirely in retrospect if not flashback, and its odd last-page twist, "The Partner" cannot help but be termed a disappointment.
