The Appeal tells the story of a small town destroyed by an immoral, rapacious corporation. They’re trying to get justice through the courts. But the corporation is too powerful. They corrupt and fund the campaign of a naïve lawyer for a judgeship. Then he judges their state supreme court appeal corruptly.

It is, of course, aggressively cyclopic: Good guys are human beings. Bad guys aren’t. That aspect isn’t interesting, except to note how it turns the villains one-dimensional. It even seeps into the quality of the narration. There’s a strange feature of the free indirect style when Grisham writes his villain: he can’t even describe the villain’s life positively from the villain’s own perspective. Or else this villain hates his own life. A lot.

The legal procedure is deeply-rendered and interesting. The details of the campaign show good, complex curlicues. The good guys are sympathetic, and fit into their world. The novel is, generally, well-written. Is it fiction or is it propaganda? That’s a question of semantics.

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