A Time to Kill?

By John Skow

John Grisham was heard to say the other day on National Public Radio that at one point he had been a strong advocate of the death penalty but that he is now troubled and undecided. He may have written himself into this state of uncertainty with his grim and impressive new novel, The Chamber (Doubleday; 486 pages; $24.95). That's the feel of the book; it's not a tract in fictional form but a work produced by painful writhing over a terrible paradox: vengeance may be justified, but killing is a shameful, demeaning response to evil.

The Chamber has the pace and characters of a thriller, but little else to suggest that it was written by the glib and cheeky author of Grisham's legal entertainments. His tough first novel, the courtroom rouser A Time to Kill, is a closer match, but there Grisham played by the rules of melodrama: the hero won. Here the winner is something called process, the orderly, unemotional, bureaucratic march through the necessary steps before a convict may be poisoned by cyanide in Mississippi's gas chamber.

Sam Cayhall, in his late 60s, is a onetime Ku Klux Klan bomber convicted in his third trial of blowing up the law office of a Jewish civil rights lawyer in 1967 and of maiming the lawyer and killing his two small sons. All that can be said in favor of Cayhall is that he shows a certain gritty courage as his execution approaches and that he regrets the death of the two boys and of a black man he killed in a rage years before. He was raised in a K.K.K. family, however, participated in several lynchings, and still believes that blacks and Jews are to be despised.

That Cayhall is a man the world could do without is clear to his grandson Adam, a shrewd, tough lawyer who turns up late in the game, determined to prevent the execution. So why fight? Adam doesn't have a clear answer, and Grisham wisely lets the reader find his own. Perhaps because Sam Cayhall is a human being, beginning to learn remorse. Perhaps because the posturing Governor and the other officials who press for the execution seem less human and less worthy than Adam and his allies. Or perhaps because forgiveness is said to be ennobling, and processing society's misfits in the gas chamber is profoundly debasing to the processors.

Or not, many will insist. Grisham may not change opinions with this sane, civil book, and he may not even be trying to. What he does ask, very plainly, is an important question: Is this what you want? Because what Grisham portrays, capital-punishment enthusiasts, is exactly what happens.