Samantha Kofer (and John Grisham) Come to Coal Country: Gray Mountain

Gray Mountain - John Grisham

Think back to 2008… Lehman's just gone under, the Dow is falling like a rock, and those industries that control the flow of money are panicked. Samantha Kofer works for such an industry – the real estate department of the world’s largest law firm. Rather, she did work there – she’s just been “furloughed.” Informed that the firm would hold her position and pay her insurance for a year if she’d intern at a suitable charity (at no pay, of course), Samantha finds herself ripped from a cushy job in Manhattan and dropped in a legal aid clinic deep in western Virginia’s coal country. Talk about your culture shock…

Take one high-powered lawyer who hasn’t seen the inside of a courtroom since passing the bar and put her in a practice one step above small claims court, and she’s either going to go insane or fall in love with her job. In Samantha’s case, it’s apparently the latter: although only slowly, she comes to the realization that the reason she practices law is not to shuffle paper for millionaires, but to make a difference for little people. Out there in coal country, there sure seem to be a lot of little people.

Samantha finds herself under the wing of another lawyer, one who fights tooth and nail against the coal companies that run the region. But the companies fight back, and it's not always just in the courts: Samantha is going to learn that the hard way.

Mountaintop coal mine (source: GreenLaw)

John Grisham is back where he started, recalling the days he published socially-relevant novels like The Pelican Brief. Never one to readily relinquish the soapbox, this time Grisham’s penned a novel that would be more preachy than entertaining were there not a vein of truth in its pages. In his description of mountaintop mining, the coal industry’s lackadaisical attitude toward the health of their employees, and the courtroom tactics of large corporations, Grisham once more exposes dirty secrets of an industry.

When it comes to Gray Mountain, whose title is drawn from a strip-mined landscape that once belonged to Samantha’s mentor, Grisham doesn’t pull any punches. He lists a litany of dirty tricks like thugs to intimidate the companies’ “enemies,” stalling tactics on black-lung claims, or “ownership” of the political process – and that’s only the beginning.

Unfortunately, Grisham’s heartfelt desire to strip the public image off the face of the coal industry makes for a somewhat dull narrative. So much of the novel is given over to expository observations about mining and on the evils of the large coal companies that the plot suffers, at least in comparison to previous legal thrillers int he Grisham oeuvre. There are no thrilling courtroom scenes, no nail-biting chases, no hair-raising fear. Samantha’s legal cases are all small potatoes, and their resolution is equally as small to fans of legal fiction. Although all that’s far closer to the real world of a small-town lawyer than television and movies would have us think, it still ends up pretty blah – but I think one can make a good case that the author didn’t write Gray Mountain to entertain, but to educate. When it comes to that front, John Grisham has penned a rousing success.