Episode 293 - Mini Episode: Brad Reviewed John Grisham

Brad talks about the John Grisham novel The Exhange

Episode Transcript

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From Geppetto Studios in New Freedom,Pennsylvania. Welcome to the Cosmic Geppetto Podcast,
your home for inclusive, positive geekculture where we talk about movies,
comics, music, books, andwhatever else we feel like. Please welcome
your host. I yes, hedoes it all for the podcast groupies.

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Brad Mendenhall, Hey kids. Inthis episode Tune ninety three of the Cosume
Corpetto Podcast. Another mini episode,And I'm gonna do something that I was

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the eight year plus history of thisshow. I don't think I've ever done.
I'm gonna do a book review becauseI want to say, six to
nine months ago, they did ajoke on SNL Weekend Update saying that John
Grisham was putting out a sequel tohis novel The Firm, which was eventually

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turned into a movie with Tom Cruise, and the joke was like, this
news brought to you by your dad, because John Grisham is definitely this sort
of writer that middle aged dad's love. Sadly, I am a middle aged
dad. I was in college whenThe Firm came out, at least when

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the movie came out, and JohnGrisham was massive at that time. Each
of his books sold like gangbusters.It seemed like every year a new movie
came up based on one of hisnovels and they were a big deal.

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You had the firm, and thatwas Tom Cruise. Interesting time of Tom
Cruise's career where he was not anaction star. It really wasn't until I
don't even think the First Top Gunwas not an action movie in that he
didn't go around beating people up.Even the First Mission Impossible movie was a

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weird action film because if you watchedthat, Tom Cruise didn't like duke it
out with the bad guys. Ifyou watch that movie, he kicked one
person and that was pretty much theonly fight he had. Everything else was
sort of adventure escaping and espionage stuff. It's very telling that the opening scene

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of the First Mission Impossible wasn't aboutsome daring do It was about them tricking
tricking an opponent into thinking someone wasdead and giving up secrets. So and
it actually makes sense because Tom Cruise, a good actor but not a man

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of smaller stature, wasn't a talland timidating presence. He wasn't Arnold Swarzenegger.
He wasn't Sylvester Stallone. While certainlyfit, but he was, you
know, it was more about himbeing good looking and being a solid dramatic
actor and having charisma and then peoplewanting to see him on screen get the

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girl. All of his early moviesreally, with a few exceptions Legend,
but that was before Legend, wasbefore he was Tom Cruise really was about
him, you know, being charmingand getting the girl and screwing it up
and then still getting the girl.The Firm was a thriller. It's funny

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because this guy who's had what sevento eight mission impossible movies, and a
bunch of them being action films wherehe's beating up. His big action scene
was beating Wilford Brimley, the Quakeroats guy with a briefcase. Things have

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changed. He's no longer beating upthe guy from Cocoon, but that changed
eventually. John Grisham being a blockbusterwriter. He used to leave very successful
writer, but it's now unusual forthem to turn his his work into a

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different property TV. I know therewas a Firm TV show that lasted one
year with Josh Lucas as the starthat didn't catch on, and he has
gone back to his previous characters acouple of times. Jake Briggins, who

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was the star of his first novel, A Time to Kill, which was
eventually turned into a movie with MatthewMcConaughey. He's brought that character back for
two more novels. And this isthe second. Mitch mcdeer, that's the
character from the Firm. And hebrought Mitch back for a novel called The

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Exchange. And it was at Walmartin their book section, and I figured
I grab it because it was liketwenty bucks for a hardcover. I figured
I would get it and give itto my parents because I'm seeing them,
and I would read it. AndI haven't read a John Grisham book in

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a long time. And I usedto read his stuff pretty regularly. It
was sort of almost hard to avoidGrisham's work, and it was very popular,
and back then in the nineties,he wasn't just popular with dads.
He was just a popular writer oflegal thrillers. But I haven't read him
for a while because there seemed tobe a pretty big lack of conflict in

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his books. He would have likethey definitely weren't legal thrillers. They were
just sort of legal books and oftenWhat would happen. I noticed in a
couple of these books. What wouldhappen is they would set something up where
two people, two groups were onopposing sides of an issue. You'd have

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a lawyer who was a bit ofa you know, a bit too perfect
and a bit too nice, andobviously it was a case of John Grisham
writing himself into a book, exceptfor the person would be you know,
younger, better looking, and seemsas every writer has at least an instinct

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to do and they would be getthrown into it. There'd be a lot
of talk about, oh, it'sa shame everyone can't be reasonable. It's
like, oh, there's a wayto be reasonable. And then at the
end everyone would just be reasonable.At the end, it's like, oh,
they were fighting over a lot ofmoney. It turns out there's enough
money for everyone to split and everyonebe happy. That was the ending to

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several of his books that I rememberreading ten years ago. Everything ended up
okay. It was a lot ofThere's a story constructor device called idiot plot,

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where the only way the plot canmove forward is if the main character
or the main characters just act likean idiot and do stuff against their own
best interest. John Grisham uses thisquite a bit. The best example I

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could think of is the book PelicanBrief, which was turned into a movie
with Julia Robertson Denzel Washington and Juliaroberts character is on the run and she
is presented as a very smart,very savvy, very aware law student at

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a prestigious university, and she isn'tsmart to figure out that she should pay
with cash instead of her credit cardbecause every time she uses her credit card
to stay at a hotel that sheends up being you know, almost nabbed.
Two pages later and it's like,well, yeah, dummy, use

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cash, and idiot plot would comein where a lot where everyone was being
so dumb and greedy and costing themselves, and then at the end everyone would
be like, oh, well maybeI should actually be just a little nicer
or agree to a reasonable compromise andthen everything would be fine. It's not

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fair to get too far into JohnGrisham's mind, but it seems like he's
almost adverse to conflict in his quoteunquote legal thrillers, and reading the Exchange,
it's sort of I got a littlebit of that vibe. So what
I'll say about the exchange is,first off, John Grisham is still a

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very readable author, by meaning itwas a three hundred and thirty page book
and I burned through it in threedays. I just he uses a very

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his writing style is very propulsive,and he's always in pop culture writers or
pop fiction writers like him, likeDan Brown who did the Da Vinci Code,
like Anne Rice jk Rowling. Butoften they have a writing style where

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it's not the deepest, it's notthe most complex, the it's not the
most challenging reading. But boy,it burned through a chapter in a heartbeat,
and that is very valuable. SoGrisham still has that. He's still

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just a very readable author and doeskeep you reading, so you cannot take
that away from him. But theplot but just a lack of compelling drama.
And the plot is that Mitch andhis wife who at the and we're

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sort of escaped from the mob andwe're on the run, but had money
and it looked like they were goingto live a happy life on the lamb,
and they very quickly in the firstfifty pages said ah nah. They
were on the lamb for a littlewhile. They lived in Europe, and

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want to speak Italian, and thendecided that they were gonna go come back
to society, and he became alawyer and a partner at a high powered
law firm and they this took placefifteen years after the first novel, so
it was the early two thousands,and then dealing with a situation in Libya

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that where he was representing a groupand took on an assistant, another lawyer
as basically his assistant, Giavanna,who we meet her briefly, as is
often the case with any female character, and at John Grisham, she's young,

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she's beautiful, she's very smart andcharming. We meet her, she
basically has dinner with Mitch, themain character, and then is immediately kidnapped
by terrorists in Libya, and therest of the book is everyone trying to

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figure out how to get her back, but it's not an action novel,
and it's just weird negotiations that kindof pull Mitch and his wife into it.
So you are wondering if they're goingto rescue a character that you only

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had two or three pages to becomeinvested in. And you know her father,
who was an older man who isrich and might be dying of cancer
who is friends with Mitch. Soyou're it was a thing where why do

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we care about this woman? Becausewe're told on one page is she's pretty
and she's charming. We don't reallywhen she's being held prisoner. We only
get a few pages here there describingher situation, so it's not enough to

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feel like we're experiencing what she's goingthrough. Mitch and his wife want her
to be rescued, but Mitch againhad one dinner with her, and his
wife never met her. So howinvested are they and there isn't The terrorists

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who kidnapped her, they have verylittle communication, so it's not even that
there's like real tense negotiations. Wefinally have a little bit of negotiation and
back and forth towards the end,but by that point it's you're three quarters
through the book. It's a littlelate to have that. So it just

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ended up she was kidnapped. There'sa ransom. It's a really big ransom.
They tried to pull the money together, and there you go. I
will admit that when you got tothe final scene, I was running.
He's like, oh my god,are they going to get her back?

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And there was a little bit ofa red herring at the end, but
it ended up getting right up prettyneatly. There just wasn't a whole lot
of story there. It felt likeit could have been. It was funny,
it was very readable. I gotthrough it in three days, but
I also felt like this probably couldhave been a thirty page short story.

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The characters are too thin. Youweren't particularly interested in a the inner lives
of these characters. They were justthin characters and they all had one or
two attributes and then you moved on. I definitely won't say it was a
bad book, because it wasn't abad book. It was any book that

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you burned through in three days andyou're interested at the end of how it
ends, that's a win. ButJohn Grisham, it's almost like he ran
out of good lines and or compellingadventures to put his characters through, and

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you know he's now just putting outvery readable, sort of disposable pop fiction.
Worst things. There's certainly worse thingsto do, and he's going back
to characters that people liked. Butyou realize, did we like the characters?
We like the firm because we thoughtMitch mcgeher was such a great character

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or do we like the Firm becauseit was a compelling conceit where he's brought
into a high power law firm andit turns out they're all bad and he
has to figure his way out ofit and how does he get out of
it? Because it's that's a compellingthing for people to read, where we
all imagine having a job where theygive us a BMW and a big paycheck

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and you're you're part of this broughtinto this great world, and then it
turns out it's bad, and youknow that's that's an interesting way to go.
But it wasn't because Mitch was sucha great character. He wasn't.
He was just the same as everyother male lead in grisham work, where

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sort of a flat character who justgets put into stuff. So, yeah,
I read it. Reading the Exchange, it reminded me what was what
you could like about John grisham workwhere he has this great breezy narrative style.

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And also why after after you've reada couple of John Grisham novels,
you've sort of read all the JohnGrisham novels, you know again there's certainly
worse things to be and I thinkwriters would be people interested in getting work

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published would do very well to readhis work and understand what he brings.
Where he doesn't bog down the reader, he doesn't slow down the reader.
He presents this really good story.He presents his story in a very digestible
way. And you know, Ithink there's some some young writers could learn

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from that. It's like, don'tbog everything down with pages on pages of
description of every door knob and everycuff link and so you have, so
then you lose narrative momentum. Yeah, he's successful for a reason, but
I have no plans on buying thenext Christian book or going back and finding

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all the ones that I haven't pickedup. So that was, yeah,
worse ways to spend my days.I did see when I was at the
bookstore last time there was a bookI didn't even know came out. I
haven't been reading as much the lastcouple of years as I would like.

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One of my favorite authors, ChristopherBuckley, wrote a book Make Oh Dang,
Make Something Great Again, and itwas a little in He writes very
funny political novels. This one takesplace during the presidency of Donald Trump and
it was for sale. I didn'tpick it up then, but I'm gonna

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pick it up next time because Ithink Chris Chris Buckley is great. He's
very smart, very cutting, veryfunny, but also has a breezy style.
So you know, I definitely owemister Grisham thank you of anything,
because he got me back into abookstore and let me think about how much

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I like reading and I haven't beendoing enough of it. All right,
kids, Well this has been alot of fun. Until next time is
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