Unresolved Issues

Someone has pointed out that in novels, unlike in real life, loose ends must always be tied up.

If you plan to read the latest John Grisham novel, “The Appeal,” and haven’t yet, and don’t want me to ruin the ending for you, you might want to skip this. When you finish the book, come back and leave your own comments at the end of this.

I went to the John Grisham website, www.jgrisham.com, hoping to leave a comment, but there’s no place for one. He’s now at the point where he no longer cares what his readers think. He’s writing for himself. I’m seriously considering letting him buy his own books in the future and ending my financial support for whatever kick he’s on.

My family and I are long-time Grisham fans, going all the way back to “The Firm” and “A Time to Kill.” We buy the latest book, and pass it around until all the adults have read it. My wife started on “The Appeal” last night and announced ten pages into it that it’s vintage Grisham and she’s already snared.

I don’t have the heart to tell her–and won’t–how it ends. In a word: frustratingly. The issues the book deals with are still unresolved. If Grisham begs to differ and says he resolved it, but just in a negative, losing way, I say, “Same difference.”

I have enough frustration in my personal life without having to shell out nearly 30 dollars to buy his version.

In the mid-1980s, when I went to pastor the First Baptist Church of Charlotte, I was pleased to discover we were broadcasting our 11 o’clock morning worship service live on the NBC affiliate, the greatest station in the Carolinas. It was costly but gave us a great outreach. I’d not been there a month when a viewer who identified herself as an older widow wrote to complain. The broadcast was ending before I completed my sermon. She said, “It feels like you’re having a nice visit with someone and suddenly, in the middle of a conversation, they get up and walk out of the house and leave. It’s most frustrating.”

Thereafter, I made sure to end the sermon while we were still on the air.

My hunch is that Mr. Grisham has grown bored with writing novels. Either that or cynical. Or maybe just tired.


Margaret and I once attended a concert in which Kiri te Kanawa, the opera diva, sang not one of the arias we had come to identify with her and for which most of us had spent big bucks for seats. Everything she sang was either new or so obscure no one but the music professors in the audience had ever heard of it. I think I know why she did it: she was tired of the stuff she usually sang. She did it for herself. She had forgotten her audience.

On the other hand, when we attended the concert by the great Luciano Pavarotti–the very definition of a crowd-pleaser–we got everything we had paid for and more.

The people who will praise Grisham’s latest novel are the kind who love movies that leave everything in the plot open-ended and unresolved. In short, the critics. I can guarantee you the average bloke who buys Grisham’s novels and who have grown accustomed to satisfying outcomes and no loose strands dangling at the end are not going to be real pleased with this book.

This business of unresolved issues and dangling ends is one reason why justice requires there to be a Judgment after this life. If there’s not, the pleasure-seeking hedonist who uses and abuses everyone around him for his own purposes and who lives a long life and dies a peaceful death has beaten the odds. If there is no Judgment, there is no justice. And if there is no justice, there’s no point.

“It is appointed unto man once to die and after that, the judgment.” (Hebrews 9:27) There is justice because there is a time scheduled on God’s calendar at which all loose ends will be tied up, all issues settled, all questions answered.

One of my other gripes about this book is the way the author has treated his home state.

Grisham tries to undo the savage beating he has administered to the state of Mississippi in the epilogue. He opens, “I am compelled to defend my native state, and do so with this flurry of disclaimers.” Then, he points out that it’s a novel, the characters are fictional, there is no Cary County, no town of Bowmore, and no chemical products such as pillamar 5, and so forth.

It’s worth noting, however, that in “defending his home state,” he’s defending it from himself. He’s the one who made up this stuff. He’s the one who caricatured the state and smeared its people. The Mississippi senator whom he beats up on in the book seems to be his version of James Eastland, who represented the state 40 years ago. One wonders if Grisham’s image of his home state is stuck in 1970.

In his “defense,” what he does not deny is that he has made out the state’s politicians to be corrupt buffoons, and the citizens to be religious simpletons. I would assume that Mississippi’s love affair with John Grisham is coming to a screeching halt. I know mine is. One of his heroes in the book is a non-denominational preacher–Grisham was Southern Baptist when he lived in Mississippi, but I don’t know what he is now–although the image he presents of other churches and pastors in this story is simplistic and negative and downright insulting. I shudder to think how people in other sections of this country, not to say out of the country altogether, will think of our Christian churches in the Deep South after reading this book.

That’s a good reason for becoming a novelist, I suppose. You can write about any subject you please and lampoon anyone you have a grievance against and do it with impunity. At the end you can say, “It’s just a novel,” thereby having things both ways.

In 1939, when James Stewart’s movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” premiered in the nation’s capital, members of Congress were invited. It was a grand celebration and everyone had a big time. They did, that is, until the movie began. Then the politicians discovered the movie presents them as corrupt pawns in the hands of big money. A lot of good people were savaged by that movie, and they rightfully walked out two hours later with nothing good to say about it. The website I checked to verify the date calls it one of the most inspiring movies ever. Not for my money. It’s simplistic and cynical and undermines the faith movie-goers want to have in their lawmakers.

This is not to say there were no corrupt lawmakers in Washington, D.C., in 1939, and that there aren’t any in Mississippi now. But a little balance would be nice.

I’m not saying I’ll not buy another John Grisham book. What I am saying is I’ll do a little research next time and find out what readers are saying.

What I will not knowingly do is spend my good money to purchase someone else’s rant and let him dump his frustrations on me. If I want to be frustrated, I will pick up the morning paper and read about the slow pace of rebuilding New Orleans. I will talk to loved ones and hear of this one’s drug problems, another’s unemployment and money woes, that one’s battle with cancer, and marital issues with still another. That’s real life and I do not run from it, but try to deal with it the best way I know how.

In re-reading the above, it feels like I am on a rant myself and for that I apologize. Actually, I’m feeling great. I’m saved, my grandchildren love me, it’s Springtime in New Orleans, and I hope to have a shrimp po-boy for lunch at a sidewalk cafe somewhere today.

12 thoughts on “Unresolved Issues

  1. John Grisham was one of the featured speakers at the recent conference for the new group of Baptists that is being formed–Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, etc. Hardly mainstream!

  2. Bro. Joe,

    At the conference mentioned above John Grisham said “I hope Baptists aren’t the Baptist church of my youth…” and then listed things like inerrancy of the Scripture, against everything – pretty much a list of Baptist doctrines. I am a great fan, as you are, but that along with his last 2 books which were boing to me (Playing for Pizza, and the true story about the wrongly accused man in OK) He is at his best in court room drama, but I’m in the middle of The Appeal -yet I take exception with the portrayal of the US Senator he describes.

    He once said he was appaled by the language Hollywood inserted in the Firm because he never wrote anything that would embrassas his mother or his children. I notice some slight deviation in this book – but then I’m one of those Baptists he seems to object to.

    Lara

  3. Thanks Lara. I’ve been looking for a Baptist church like the church of my youth for the past 20 years 😉

  4. Joe,

    I have not read The Appeal. However, your description has caught my attention. There may not be a Cary County in Mississippi, but there is certainly a Cary, Mississippi located in Sharkey County just 35 miles north of Vicksburg. I know because that is my home town. Furthermore, in 1976 I moved to the Linn community in Sunflower County to pastor the Linn Baptist Church. I lived just a few miles from the home of Senator Eastland. Since the Eastlands were Methodists and attended a little Methodist church in Doddsville, I never saw them in our church. However, I discovered the Eastlands to be a very caring family for the other families in the community. They were deeply loved by everyone in that area. If you remember, Senator Eastland was not only a very powerful political figure, but was also considered one of the top ten richest senators. Many complained that everytime he introducted legislation that was aimed toward helping farmers, he was only helping himself. The other farmers in Mississippi understood that as Eastland was helping himself, he was also helping them.

    I am living in Louisiana now and I am loving living in Louisiana. But that does not mean I have lost my love for my home state of Mississippi. My feathers get ruffled quickly, when I hear someone unjustly smearing my home state. We have received enough bad press. We do not need any more.

  5. Marty – I am years older than you but I too am would love to attend a church “of old” where the doxology is sung and reverence in the church building is golden.

    John Grisham – I thought he was writing about Clay and Lowndes County! Cancer abound, factories have been sued and closed and a wise woman Supreme Court Judge was defeated and replaced by someone who much lesser abilities.

  6. I have never lived in Mississippi but I have a special place in my heart for the people.

    (Highway patrol excluded.) I used to do Bible Drill workshops for the MS Baptist Convention.

    The church leaders would tell me about their association and district drills. Their pastors would attend and parents would take time off work to watch their children/youth drill. Schools would give excused absents.

    I used to kid the fine people and tell them that MS was backwards. After waiting a minute for a defensive look I would then say, “Mississippians still think the bible is important.” I pray that they will always rub the world the wrong way (Grisham included), that means they are likely doing it God’s way.

  7. Mr. Grisham now lives in Charlottesville, VA, and attends University Baptist Church, a congregation affiliated with the CBF and located across the street from the University of Virginia. On their website(www.universitybaptist.org), the church proudly states that while they have Baptist roots, they are “ecumenical in that many members bring Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, and Catholic experiences to enrich our life and work.” For those unfamiliar with Virginia, Charlottesville is a deep blue dot in a sea of red, politically speaking, and UBC is pretty much a reflection of that.

    I really don’t like to throw stones at other believers, particularly Baptists, but I do think that Mr. Grisham’s comments at the New Covenant meeting were mean-spirited and ill-conceived, particularly at a meeting where the stated goal was to build bridges. Perhaps he should stick to law and literature.

  8. If Mr. Grisham and Mr. Carter want to be methodists or episcopalians, I’m sure the UMC and TEC will welcome them with open arms.

    I certainly don’t see the point of trying to change the SBC into something more like the UMC or TEC. Embrace the diversity.

  9. I must confess I have never read a John Grisham Book. You may say how have you survived? Very well, thank you. I saw the movie “The Firm” and I thought it was very entertaining. I don’t need to read his books, I read mostly non-fiction books (I like history the best, so much to learn from it)for my work and for enjoyment and the newspaper. But the book I like best is the Bible, it is the’inerrant, infallible Word Of God’ regardless of what Mr. Grisham has to say

    about it and has all the characters in it that a Grisham book would have. But, all these characters truly existed and some came to ‘faith’ in Our Lord and Savior and some didn’t. I was like those, thankfully, in the former category that came to ‘belief’ late in life.

    It sounds to me like Mr. Grisham has made a veiled attempt to try and destroy the reputation of the majority of faithful MS. Christians, representatives in government, and large corporations and leave an impression that those of us who live in the South are ignorant hayseeds that have mush for brains. I’ve lived in 2 states my whole life Mississippi and Louisiana (two times, it is my birthstate, and where I lived for 15 years before moving to Mississippi and then back to Louisiana 6 years ago)and both states have their blemishes but I can say without a doubt, the majority of the people in both states are comprised of hard-working, generous people who would go out of their way to help you and I wouldn’t trade them by living anywhere else in America. And many are God fearing Christians, hopefully more will be

    before I leave this earth.

    Mr. Grisham may be a native of Mississippi, but he’s far from his ‘Roots’. OK, here’s some advice John, as if you would take it,

    you need to go back to your “Roots”. Remember these verses in Sunday School about the Sower-“And some fell on stony ground and the cares of this world choked them out”. I can relate to that

    for many years I allowed the Word to be choked out by the cares of this world and what is that about a “man shall not live by bread alone but by every Word that precedes out of the mouth of” John Grisham, I don’t think that’s it, do you? It’s never too late, until after you’ve breathed your last breath, hope you will remember the ‘ancient landmarks’ one day as I did finally, Praise the Lord Jesus Christ! HE is faithful, even when we aren’t.

  10. When I was 17, I was saved and called to ministry. I had no idea what I was getting into and certainly no idea that I would be a pastor someday. I am concerned that many of us baptists have yet to learn to disagree in Christian love and to always uphold our Savior in all we do. This morning as I arose, I did so hearing about John McCain’s “supposed infidelity.” Whether it is true or not, the secular media runs with it as a hungry hound chases a rabbit. My prayer for several years is that baptists might be a people who understand and practice, as did Jesus, being silent on the unimportant and being seering on the paramount. In doing less, our role of being a light in darkness diminishes if not being extinguished.

    I want my little light to shine, here in California, where there seems to be only a few lighted spots and a deep sea of darkness. I have a hunch, it is that way in most places. Bryan

  11. Joe, The only yardstick for John Grisham, or Hugh Hefner or any other writer or artist is… S A L E S. They’re not too concerned with one individual’s opinion, or even a minority.

    Remember the Beatles in 1964? Many people hated their music. They still sold millions of records.

    Thomas Wolfe wrote “Look Homeward Angel” and exposed and trashed much of the people in Asheville, NC. They practically ran him out of town. It turned out to be a worldwide best seller and made him famous.

    Don’t you think ‘Mr. Smith Goes To Washington’ was reality? A sizable percent of lawmakers have always been corrupt….can be bought. That’s our system.

    When writers and artists hold up a mirror to our society I want to see the real truth. Don’t white wash it.

    H.A.

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