So what’s it gonna be—literary fiction or popular fiction?” asks a character in John Grisham’s latest, Camino Island . As for Grisham himself, the answer seems obvious.
Ever since the blockbuster success of The Firm propelled him into the echelons of millionaire authors, he has dutifully churned out courtroom thriller year after year, his output occasionally punctuated with left turns like the small-town bildungsroman A Painted House (2001) or the earnest sports family drama, Calico Joe (2012).
Camino Island , Grisham’s 30th novel in a span of 28 years, is his stab at the beach book.
A mercenary gang orchestrates a heist in Princeton University and makes off with five F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscripts. Several months later, Mercer Mann, a young, recently unemployed writer gets a delectable financial offer from a security company and a chance to work on her long-gestating second novel on the eponymous island. The catch? She must work as a grifter and help investigators nab Bruce Cable, the respected and rakish bookseller and bookdealer who is suspected to be in possession of the priceless manuscripts.
In the vacation paradise, living in her late grandmother’s seaside cottage, Mercer finds herself in an eclectic literary community led by Bruce and his partner Noelle, a woman with a penchant for French antiques. Will Mercer work her literary charms and win Bruce’s confidences?
This briskly paced novel has its modest share of frothiness that is expected of a beach read. When characters just hang out, drinking wine and discussing writing, Camino Island ’s tone, a disarming mixture of joie de vivre and self-awareness, is intoxicating.
Unfortunately, Grisham can’t shake off his workmanlike instincts for too long. Scenes don’t leisurely unfold as much as race to their inevitable end. Moreover, the characters are flat. Concocting flawed but morally upright firebrands like Jake Brigance is more up Grisham’s alley, not conmen with shaky moral compasses.
Fitzgerald aficionados may be tickled by the novel’s subtext that the American dream is inextricably linked with deceit.
If that indeed was what Grisham was going for, then Camino Island might be more audacious than I’ve given it credit for.
An editor at a children’s publishing house, the writer worships at the altar of Michael Chabon.
