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The Associate (novel)
Encyclopedia
The Associate is a legal thriller
by John Grisham
. His twenty-first novel, it was published by Doubleday and released in the United States on January 27, 2009.
, Kyle McAvoy has the promise of a highly successful career, although after graduation, he intends to devote three years to public service before applying for employment with a prestigious firm. His plans are derailed when he is approached by two FBI agents (later proved to be bogus) who interogate him and then pass him on to a mysterious man known only as Bennie Wright. Bennie has a videotape of a party that took place in Kyle's apartment five years earlier, when he was an undergraduate student at Duquesne University
. In it, two of Kyle's fraternity
brothers, Joey Bernardo and Baxter Tate, are seen having sexual relations with Elaine Keenan, a coed who later claimed she was raped while unconscious, a charge seemingly supported by Joey asking Baxter "Is she awake?" on the tape. At the time, the incident was investigated by local police, who determined there had been no assault and declined to take further action. With the tape now in his possession, Bennie threatens to expose Kyle's secret unless he cooperates with him and his associates.
Bennie's plan is to have Kyle accept a position at New York City
-based Scully & Pershing, the world's largest law firm, which is representing Trylon Aeronautics in its case against Bartin Dynamics. The two defense contractors had joined forces to design the B-10 HyperSonic Bomber for The Pentagon
, and when they won the contract over Lockheed
, the competitor sought support from senators and lobbyists. Legal battles ensued, and Trylon and Bartin – each laying claim to ownership of the design and technologies developed for the project – are ready to wage battle in court. Kyle will be required to infiltrate Scully & Pershing's files and deliver to Bennie crucial information the people he represents need.
His first instinct is to ignore Bennie's blackmail threats and deal with whatever consequences may arise, but the thought of the shame and embarrassment his family will suffer if he is indicted for the incident in his past, not to mention the negative impact on his own future, leads him to agree to Bennie's demands.
Constantly under surveillance while outdoors and living in an apartment in which he knows bugs
and cameras have been hidden, Kyle slowly learns how to trick those who are trailing him into believing he is unaware of their presence. He seeks help from Joey, who has more to lose than Kyle does if the videotape is made public, and with his old friend as a somewhat unwilling accomplice, plots to outwit his blackmailer. What he doesn't anticipate is the re-emergence of Elaine, who still maintains she was raped, and Baxter, who has completed a lengthy stint in rehab and, as part of his twelve-step program
, wants to make amends to the girl he raped. His admission of guilt will give Elaine the proof she needs to file charges, and with Kyle drawn into the spotlight, his position at Scully & Pershing will be jeopardized, a risk Bennie must eliminate by any means. Baxter is found shot dead, with no evidence of the murderer's identity, although Kyle is certain that Bennie ordered it.
After working at the law firm's 'boot camp' for some months, as do all new associates, Kyle eventually gets drawn into the Trylon case and is granted access to the highly secure computer room where the confidential information is stored. Bennie and Nigel, a computer expert, force him to use a thumbdrive to download the files, which he does. But by this time, realising that Bennie is nearly always one step ahead of him, Kyle has spoken to Roy Benedict, a criminal lawyer and former FBI operative. He tells Roy the whole story.
Roy still has good connections within the FBI, and they set up an operation to catch Bennie as the information is being transferred. But it misfires; Bennie and his associates vanish and remain unidentified and unapprehended.
Kyle admits his actions to the firm's partners, and agrees to leave their employ immediately and not practice law in New York for two years. He also voices his belief that one of the firm's partners has acted as a 'mole', passing information to Bennie.
Refusing the FBI's offer of witness protection
, Kyle goes home to his father, also a lawyer, who knows the whole sorry saga. He plans to became a partner in his father's law firm.
man who, as part of his Alcoholics Anonymous
program, wrote a letter of apology to a woman he had raped at a fraternity party at the University of Virginia
in 1984. Her claim had been ignored by the police and school officials at the time, but nineteen years later his admission of guilt resulted in his being charged with rape and eventually serving six months in prison after plea bargaining.
of the New York Times stated, "Mr. Grisham so often writes similar books that the same things must be said of them. The Associate is true to form: it grabs the reader quickly, becomes impossible to put down, stays that way through most of its story, and then escalates into plotting so crazily far-fetched that it defies resolution. Kyle McAvoy is another of the two-dimensional yet terrifically likeable heroes who come to life on Mr. Grisham’s pages only to evaporate later. It’s easy to predict what choice Kyle will make at the end of the novel. It’s impossible to imagine, let alone care, what his life will be like once the improbably wild furor surrounding this one lone law-firm recruit is over."
Richard Rayner of the Los Angeles Times
said, "Nobody goes to Grisham for style, and there's a sense here of a skilled craftsman cranking it out on autopilot. Nothing much happens, and when it happens, it's pretty predictable. Grisham's Kyle is cardboard-thin (Scott Turow
has a much defter hand with character), but Grisham is an effective lens through which we observe the intricacies of corporate law, an easily corruptible world governed, not by right and wrong, but by the concept of the billable hour . . . The Associate springs to angry life from time to time, but on the whole it's by the numbers, a plodding page-turner. But it's still a page-turner: Many of Grisham's legions of fans will doubtless sign up for this latest ride, eager to see how Kyle McAvoy manages to get himself out of the hole. With ideals restored, Grisham ensures, making Kyle an appealing model for our troubled new time."
Patrick Anderson of the Washington Post observed, "Grisham has long since proved his narrative talent. His plot is highly fanciful, and he makes it easy for us to keep flipping the pages to see if Kyle can find a way out of this mess. He mostly writes clean, workmanlike prose, but I have one stylistic complaint about the novel. It's important to Grisham not only that Kyle be seen as noble, but also that his tormentor be a rat. Thus, as Bennie spits out his nefarious demands, we're variously told that he speaks 'with a sneer,' with a 'smart-ass grin,' with a 'silly smirk.' Enough already; we get it."
Charles Taylor of Newsday
said, "You don't need to be sadistic or foul-mouthed to write a good thriller, but you need exactly what Grisham lacks: a taste for cunning, meanness and grit. He sets up a big showdown only to walk away from it, and so the tension just dribbles off. Worse, Grisham's country-mouse attitude toward the big, bad city - where apartments rent for thousands of dollars a month and you can't find a good $3.99 blue-plate special at the local diner - is a drag. Who wants to reach for a thriller and wind up with Frank Capra
?"
Lev Grossman of Time
said the novel "ticks along lightly and pleasantly — it's crafted and paced with the same signature glossy perfection that makes Grisham, book for book, probably the best-selling novelist in the world. It's just that it's not about anything. In fact it's amazing that anybody could put together a book that is this compulsively readable while at the same time being almost entirely devoid of substance of any kind . . . The Associate is as close to being about nothing as a book can be — it's a masterpiece of almost ghostly narrative minimalism, a book of names without characters, a book with plot points but no plot. There's something comforting about the meaningless hindbrain tension that The Associate generates in the reader — empty tension, the kind where there's nothing genuine at stake. Comforting too is the cozy quaintness of Grisham's little world. It's supposed to be a scary place, in theory, full of brooding criminals and impossible choices, but it's really a relic of the American past, one as sentimental and archaic as a Norman Rockwell
painting . . . The Associate is high-calorie comfort food, a thriller that doesn't actually thrill."
Joshua Rozenberg of The Observer
said, "Suffice it to say that The Associate bears many similarities to The Firm, even down to the two dust jackets, which both show shadowy young lawyers on the run. Plagiarism
? No, because both books are by John Grisham. Those who believed, even for a moment, that I was suggesting impropriety will recognise this as the sort of false trail that Grisham uses to good effect . . . Though our hero believes himself to be in the clear, he goes along with the blackmailers' demands. The reader screams at him to call their bluff, but that would ruin the story. So we suspend our disbelief. Then, just as we have got used to the idea, he changes his mind and sets about trapping the blackmailers after all. And that's it. The ending is curiously flat."
Legal thriller
The legal thriller is a sub-genre of thriller and crime fiction in which the major characters are lawyers and their employees. The system of justice itself is always a major part of these works, at times almost functioning as one of the characters...
by John Grisham
John Grisham
John Ray Grisham, Jr. is an American lawyer and author, best known for his popular legal thrillers.John Grisham graduated from Mississippi State University before attending the University of Mississippi School of Law in 1981 and practiced criminal law for about a decade...
. His twenty-first novel, it was published by Doubleday and released in the United States on January 27, 2009.
Plot summary
As an idealistic law student and editor-in-chief of the Yale Law JournalYale Law Journal
The Yale Law Journal is a student-run law review affiliated with the Yale Law School. Published continuously since 1891, it is the most widely known of the eight law reviews published by students at Yale Law School...
, Kyle McAvoy has the promise of a highly successful career, although after graduation, he intends to devote three years to public service before applying for employment with a prestigious firm. His plans are derailed when he is approached by two FBI agents (later proved to be bogus) who interogate him and then pass him on to a mysterious man known only as Bennie Wright. Bennie has a videotape of a party that took place in Kyle's apartment five years earlier, when he was an undergraduate student at Duquesne University
Duquesne University
Duquesne University of the Holy Spirit is a private Catholic university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. Founded by members of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, Duquesne first opened its doors as the Pittsburgh Catholic College of the Holy Ghost in October 1878 with an enrollment of...
. In it, two of Kyle's fraternity
Fraternity
A fraternity is a brotherhood, though the term usually connotes a distinct or formal organization. An organization referred to as a fraternity may be a:*Secret society*Chivalric order*Benefit society*Friendly society*Social club*Trade union...
brothers, Joey Bernardo and Baxter Tate, are seen having sexual relations with Elaine Keenan, a coed who later claimed she was raped while unconscious, a charge seemingly supported by Joey asking Baxter "Is she awake?" on the tape. At the time, the incident was investigated by local police, who determined there had been no assault and declined to take further action. With the tape now in his possession, Bennie threatens to expose Kyle's secret unless he cooperates with him and his associates.
Bennie's plan is to have Kyle accept a position at New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
-based Scully & Pershing, the world's largest law firm, which is representing Trylon Aeronautics in its case against Bartin Dynamics. The two defense contractors had joined forces to design the B-10 HyperSonic Bomber for The Pentagon
The Pentagon
The Pentagon is the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense, located in Arlington County, Virginia. As a symbol of the U.S. military, "the Pentagon" is often used metonymically to refer to the Department of Defense rather than the building itself.Designed by the American architect...
, and when they won the contract over Lockheed
Lockheed Corporation
The Lockheed Corporation was an American aerospace company. Lockheed was founded in 1912 and later merged with Martin Marietta to form Lockheed Martin in 1995.-Origins:...
, the competitor sought support from senators and lobbyists. Legal battles ensued, and Trylon and Bartin – each laying claim to ownership of the design and technologies developed for the project – are ready to wage battle in court. Kyle will be required to infiltrate Scully & Pershing's files and deliver to Bennie crucial information the people he represents need.
His first instinct is to ignore Bennie's blackmail threats and deal with whatever consequences may arise, but the thought of the shame and embarrassment his family will suffer if he is indicted for the incident in his past, not to mention the negative impact on his own future, leads him to agree to Bennie's demands.
Constantly under surveillance while outdoors and living in an apartment in which he knows bugs
Covert listening device
A covert listening device, more commonly known as a bug or a wire, is usually a combination of a miniature radio transmitter with a microphone. The use of bugs, called bugging, is a common technique in surveillance, espionage and in police investigations.A bug does not have to be a device...
and cameras have been hidden, Kyle slowly learns how to trick those who are trailing him into believing he is unaware of their presence. He seeks help from Joey, who has more to lose than Kyle does if the videotape is made public, and with his old friend as a somewhat unwilling accomplice, plots to outwit his blackmailer. What he doesn't anticipate is the re-emergence of Elaine, who still maintains she was raped, and Baxter, who has completed a lengthy stint in rehab and, as part of his twelve-step program
Twelve-step program
A Twelve-Step Program is a set of guiding principles outlining a course of action for recovery from addiction, compulsion, or other behavioral problems...
, wants to make amends to the girl he raped. His admission of guilt will give Elaine the proof she needs to file charges, and with Kyle drawn into the spotlight, his position at Scully & Pershing will be jeopardized, a risk Bennie must eliminate by any means. Baxter is found shot dead, with no evidence of the murderer's identity, although Kyle is certain that Bennie ordered it.
After working at the law firm's 'boot camp' for some months, as do all new associates, Kyle eventually gets drawn into the Trylon case and is granted access to the highly secure computer room where the confidential information is stored. Bennie and Nigel, a computer expert, force him to use a thumbdrive to download the files, which he does. But by this time, realising that Bennie is nearly always one step ahead of him, Kyle has spoken to Roy Benedict, a criminal lawyer and former FBI operative. He tells Roy the whole story.
Roy still has good connections within the FBI, and they set up an operation to catch Bennie as the information is being transferred. But it misfires; Bennie and his associates vanish and remain unidentified and unapprehended.
Kyle admits his actions to the firm's partners, and agrees to leave their employ immediately and not practice law in New York for two years. He also voices his belief that one of the firm's partners has acted as a 'mole', passing information to Bennie.
Refusing the FBI's offer of witness protection
Witness protection
Witness protection is protection of a threatened witness or any person involved in the justice system, including defendants and other clients, before, during and after a trial, usually by police...
, Kyle goes home to his father, also a lawyer, who knows the whole sorry saga. He plans to became a partner in his father's law firm.
Background
Grisham's plot is based in part on the case of a Las VegasLas Vegas, Nevada
Las Vegas is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Nevada and is also the county seat of Clark County, Nevada. Las Vegas is an internationally renowned major resort city for gambling, shopping, and fine dining. The city bills itself as The Entertainment Capital of the World, and is famous...
man who, as part of his Alcoholics Anonymous
Alcoholics Anonymous
Alcoholics Anonymous is an international mutual aid movement which says its "primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics achieve sobriety." Now claiming more than 2 million members, AA was founded in 1935 by Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith in Akron, Ohio...
program, wrote a letter of apology to a woman he had raped at a fraternity party at the University of Virginia
University of Virginia
The University of Virginia is a public research university located in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States, founded by Thomas Jefferson...
in 1984. Her claim had been ignored by the police and school officials at the time, but nineteen years later his admission of guilt resulted in his being charged with rape and eventually serving six months in prison after plea bargaining.
Critical reception
Janet MaslinJanet Maslin
Janet Maslin is an American journalist, best known as a film and literary critic for The New York Times. She served as the Times film critic from 1977–1999.- Biography :...
of the New York Times stated, "Mr. Grisham so often writes similar books that the same things must be said of them. The Associate is true to form: it grabs the reader quickly, becomes impossible to put down, stays that way through most of its story, and then escalates into plotting so crazily far-fetched that it defies resolution. Kyle McAvoy is another of the two-dimensional yet terrifically likeable heroes who come to life on Mr. Grisham’s pages only to evaporate later. It’s easy to predict what choice Kyle will make at the end of the novel. It’s impossible to imagine, let alone care, what his life will be like once the improbably wild furor surrounding this one lone law-firm recruit is over."
Richard Rayner of the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
said, "Nobody goes to Grisham for style, and there's a sense here of a skilled craftsman cranking it out on autopilot. Nothing much happens, and when it happens, it's pretty predictable. Grisham's Kyle is cardboard-thin (Scott Turow
Scott Turow
Scott F. Turow is an American author and a practicing lawyer. Turow has written eight fiction and two nonfiction books, which have been translated into over 20 languages and have sold over 25 million copies...
has a much defter hand with character), but Grisham is an effective lens through which we observe the intricacies of corporate law, an easily corruptible world governed, not by right and wrong, but by the concept of the billable hour . . . The Associate springs to angry life from time to time, but on the whole it's by the numbers, a plodding page-turner. But it's still a page-turner: Many of Grisham's legions of fans will doubtless sign up for this latest ride, eager to see how Kyle McAvoy manages to get himself out of the hole. With ideals restored, Grisham ensures, making Kyle an appealing model for our troubled new time."
Patrick Anderson of the Washington Post observed, "Grisham has long since proved his narrative talent. His plot is highly fanciful, and he makes it easy for us to keep flipping the pages to see if Kyle can find a way out of this mess. He mostly writes clean, workmanlike prose, but I have one stylistic complaint about the novel. It's important to Grisham not only that Kyle be seen as noble, but also that his tormentor be a rat. Thus, as Bennie spits out his nefarious demands, we're variously told that he speaks 'with a sneer,' with a 'smart-ass grin,' with a 'silly smirk.' Enough already; we get it."
Charles Taylor of Newsday
Newsday
Newsday is a daily American newspaper that primarily serves Nassau and Suffolk counties and the New York City borough of Queens on Long Island, although it is sold throughout the New York metropolitan area...
said, "You don't need to be sadistic or foul-mouthed to write a good thriller, but you need exactly what Grisham lacks: a taste for cunning, meanness and grit. He sets up a big showdown only to walk away from it, and so the tension just dribbles off. Worse, Grisham's country-mouse attitude toward the big, bad city - where apartments rent for thousands of dollars a month and you can't find a good $3.99 blue-plate special at the local diner - is a drag. Who wants to reach for a thriller and wind up with Frank Capra
Frank Capra
Frank Russell Capra was a Sicilian-born American film director. He emigrated to the U.S. when he was six, and eventually became a creative force behind major award-winning films during the 1930s and 1940s...
?"
Lev Grossman of Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
said the novel "ticks along lightly and pleasantly — it's crafted and paced with the same signature glossy perfection that makes Grisham, book for book, probably the best-selling novelist in the world. It's just that it's not about anything. In fact it's amazing that anybody could put together a book that is this compulsively readable while at the same time being almost entirely devoid of substance of any kind . . . The Associate is as close to being about nothing as a book can be — it's a masterpiece of almost ghostly narrative minimalism, a book of names without characters, a book with plot points but no plot. There's something comforting about the meaningless hindbrain tension that The Associate generates in the reader — empty tension, the kind where there's nothing genuine at stake. Comforting too is the cozy quaintness of Grisham's little world. It's supposed to be a scary place, in theory, full of brooding criminals and impossible choices, but it's really a relic of the American past, one as sentimental and archaic as a Norman Rockwell
Norman Rockwell
Norman Percevel Rockwell was a 20th-century American painter and illustrator. His works enjoy a broad popular appeal in the United States for their reflection of American culture. Rockwell is most famous for the cover illustrations of everyday life scenarios he created for The Saturday Evening...
painting . . . The Associate is high-calorie comfort food, a thriller that doesn't actually thrill."
Joshua Rozenberg of The Observer
The Observer
The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...
said, "Suffice it to say that The Associate bears many similarities to The Firm, even down to the two dust jackets, which both show shadowy young lawyers on the run. Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...
? No, because both books are by John Grisham. Those who believed, even for a moment, that I was suggesting impropriety will recognise this as the sort of false trail that Grisham uses to good effect . . . Though our hero believes himself to be in the clear, he goes along with the blackmailers' demands. The reader screams at him to call their bluff, but that would ruin the story. So we suspend our disbelief. Then, just as we have got used to the idea, he changes his mind and sets about trapping the blackmailers after all. And that's it. The ending is curiously flat."