Grisham is the master Rainmaker

The Rainmaker; John Grisham; 434 pages; Published by Doubleday, New York, New York.

JAKARTA (JP): A novel about a young lawyer trying to unveil a health insurance scam doesn't sound very sexy. You really can't get a worse combination than the complexity of civil litigation and the tedious insurance industry for a novel.

It takes a genius, or a John Grisham, to turn a story line like this into a best seller novel.

And yes, the suspense master has done it again. His latest book, The Rainmaker, became the number one best seller in New York within only two weeks of hitting the streets. And, like all his previous works, it is sure to become a best seller here -- both the English original and the Indonesian translation.

And there is a big surprise for Grisham's fans out there, The Rainmaker is written in the first person.

All his previous five novels -- A Time to Kill, The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client and The Chamber -- were written in the third person. This allowed the author to intimately explore each character. He could describe any scene or setting and use lots of flashbacks to build up to the climax.

Writing in the first person eliminates these luxuries. The reader becomes subjective because he sees and feels only through the hero. On the other hand, the advantage of the first person novel is that there aren't too many aberrations -- like the flashbacks or the study of new characters -- to distract from the story.

There is another welcome element not found in Grisham's previous works: Humor. There's plenty of it in The Rainmaker, but it is used in such a way as to support, rather than distract from, the flow of the story.

There is just enough romance to add spice to the story.

It is amazing how Grisham has managed to keep romance and sex to the minimum in all his novels, but still manages to write best sellers. His strength is in the story line and in building up the suspense.

Like Forrest Gump (the film), The Rainmaker (the book, and probably the film too) tells the story from the hero's perspectives. The hero here is not an idiot, but a young man bumping along with breaks of life. He has a scam of his own in his litigation battle against a big insurance company. He has the expected powerful enemies but he also gets help from here and there.

Rather than lots of beautiful young women, the hero, a young man of little financial means and lots of bad breaks, is surrounded by old people, a man with an oversize head, and many men with beer guts. His encounter with romance is with a badly bruised woman who is a victim of a wife-beating.

In anybody else's hands, the setting and the characters would be sure to produce a really poor novel.

The story is about Rudy Baylor, a young man who is about to complete law school at Memphis State University.

Rudy is required to provide free legal advice to a group of senior citizens, and it is there that he meets his first "clients", Dot and Buddy Black. Their son, Donny Ray, is dying of leukemia and their insurance company has flatly refused to pay for his medical treatment.

At first skeptical, Rudy soon realizes that the Blacks really have been shockingly mistreated by the huge company, and that he just may have stumbled upon one of the largest insurance frauds anyone's ever seen -- and one of the most lucrative and important cases in the history of civil litigation. The problem is, Rudy's flat broke, has no job, hasn't even passed the bar, and is about to go head-to-head with one of the biggest defense attorneys as well as one of the most powerful industries in America.

The rainmaker label doesn't suit the unlikely hero because he continuously gets unexpected breaks.

The rainmaker title is more aptly applied to the author for his ingenuity in creating a novel based on settings and characters other writers would avoid.

The Rainmaker is not simply just another of Grisham's hits. It is a work of art from an elevated master of suspense novels.

-- Endy Bayuni