So Is Robert Tanenbaum Our Best Judicial Novelist?
(And What Does Janet Maslin Think?)

NYTBR naysayers who criticize the weekly review's treatment of fiction will certainly gripe about in this week's issue, in which only two fiction books get individualized treatment, and one of those reviews might just as easily have been consigned to Marilyn Stasio's crime column, since it offers Alan Dershowitz's take on John Grisham:

"There are few writers today capable of producing political novels of the quality of those once written by C. P. Snow and Alan Drury. Our best contemporary political novelist, Richard North Patterson, spends months interviewing the politicians upon whom he loosely bases his characters. He also masters the political issues he writes about--abortion, gun control, capital punishment. Compared with Patterson's likelife presidents, senators, congressmen and lobbyists, Grisham's political characters are stick figures--entirely predictable stereotypes without flesh and blood."

That sound you hear is the accumulative laughter of folks like Jenny Davidson laughing at Dershowitz's bold critical folly. My own immediate reaction came right after the line about Patterson's interviews with his character models. "Gee," says I to myself, "the ol' Ouija board must get a lot of action chatting up those Kennedys." But let's concede for the moment that Patterson is a "political novelist" just as Dershowitz says: in that case, his cardboard characters don't even begin to hold a candle to the genuinely realistic men and women in Charles McCarry's equally "political" Old Boys...but then, the closest NYTBR got to reviewing that was a Laura Miller namedrop.

UPDATE: Janet Maslin uses her NYT Mystery Monday slot to summarize Grisham's plot, such as it is. "It's certainly Mr. Grisham's prerogative to try new things," she sniffs, "and to make his own personal escape from the thriller format." She, however, finds The Broker somewhere between "notably relaxed" and "lazy." Be warned, though: she also gives away huge chunks of the ending. (No word yet on whether she shares Dersh's take on Richard North Patterson...)