Legal Eagle

By John Skow

THE PELICAN BRIEF

by John Grisham

Doubleday; 371 pages; $22.50

Our gloriously contrary society despises lawyers with openhearted loathing (to exactly the degree, in fact, that it loves lawsuits). Anyone who doubts this should consider John Grisham's 1991 thriller, The Firm. At a casual look, The Firm was a competent, but fairly routine, on-the-run-pursued-by-nasties page turner. But it stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for an entire year, something accomplished by nothing but Dr. Seuss books and the kind of self-help manual that advises you to Hate Your Way to a Firmer, More Youthful Figure. The explanation -- to the extent that there can be one (after a certain uncritical mass is reached, a best seller best-sells because it is a best seller)--is that the villains were the partners of a rich, greedy, overbearing, dishonest law firm. In loving detail, the reader was encouraged to hate these poltroons.

It's not a great surprise that The Pelican Brief, Grisham's new novel, is as close to its predecessor as you can get without running The Firm through the office copier. As before, a handsome young couple are pursued by thugs. In the background are members of a corrupt law firm who sleazily shuffle paper, rack up grossly inflated billable hours and conspire in the bumping off of a couple of liberal Supreme Court Justices.

Oddly, Gray Grantham, the male half of Grisham's protagonist couple, is an investigative reporter for the Washington Post and, relatively speaking, one of the good guys. This is a blow; journalists like to consider themselves outcasts from decent society, and novelist Grisham is telling them that their reading on the nation's revulsion meter is insignificant. Grantham's fellow fugitive and lady love is Darby Shaw, a beautiful law student who, in the finest tradition of 19th century fiction, is saved from a life of litigation when she drops out of law school perilously close to the bar exam. Honor almost stained is surefire, and in successive Grisham melodramas, we may expect heroines rescued at the last moment from careers as Congresswomen, TV weather babblers and Tobacco Institute scientists.