A story about Ron Williamson, a high-school baseball standout and major-league hopeful, and his friend, who together suffered a wrongful murder conviction in 1987 at the hands of maniacal law enforcement and a prosecution blinded to truth and justice and anything else not within the path of personal victory. And who were finally exonerated, together, in 1999, thanks to a U.S. District Court judge who recognized the forces that had conspired to bring Ron and his friend to trial and the absurd things that occurred in the justice system to condemn one to life in prison and the other to perdition on death row; and thanks even more so to the fidelity and long suffering of the story's implicit heroes—Ron's sisters—as well as the arduous charity of many lawyers and advocates who declined to quit on either justice or Ron.
A story in which popular and acclaimed novelist John Grisham retraces Ron's long, calamitous voyage through a succession of sea storms—a voyage that took him within a hair's-breadth of death by lethal injection, and which ended in 2005, when Williamson died in the free world from cirrhosis of the liver, the final emancipation for a puerile man who suffered and who was a burden to many his entire life.
I know people who are addicted to Grisham's popular novels—most of whom are not even book readers by instinct—and it's by and large for the same reasons: Grisham never fails to create and then sustain a suspense throughout his stories that is so unbearable the reader's only recourse is to keep the book open and continue reading to the very end; which is possible, because Grisham's ultimate praise is that he writes good stuff with such simple and fluid sentences that the reader can roll through 300 pages with ease, pausing only to blink or catch his breath.
But in this book Grisham deviates from his norm. He places more emphasis—and tenderness—on his characters, above all those on the receiving end of the injustice. With time and adjectives he expounds on who they are, and not just what they did. It's as if he, Grisham, had for the first time felt the immeasurable responsibility that comes with writing about real people. Not that he didn't care for the characters he has molded out of his storyteller's spirit in the past—for he is a Mississippian, and it's well-established that writers from Mississippi care about their people—but that perhaps it took an endeavor in nonfiction for him to understand the responsibility that comes with it.
For this reason, it appears, he makes the novice's mistake of writing his first nonfiction book with too much sympathy. While in my view there is no reproach in either literature or journalism for writing with compassion, Grisham, as the story reveals itself, becomes more of an advocate than a reporter, invading the reader's province to judge the people constituting the story. And even more troublesome: He does so for only half the characters—only those seated at the defendant's table and the ones who support them—treating the people on the other side of the injustice without pity, having forgotten that those nonfiction characters, too, were created by the same source that molded Ron Williamson and his advocates, out of the same dust and clay.
At any rate, on account of Grisham's concern for his characters, The Innocent Man progresses at a slower pace than Grisham faithfuls are accustomed to. And in this new project, he in large part does away with suspense.
If this isn't made clear in the title, then it becomes unequivocal by the second chapter, when Grisham delves into Ron Williamson's character with such a paternal tone that it would be unthinkable for him to allow a tragic ending to fall upon his protagonist. Yet, that is not to say Grisham forgets the value of sustaining tension. As evidenced by his body of work, he is well-acquainted with the legal system and the inherent drama it presents, and he is masterful in lending it to his narrative. It's just that now, the tension is not based on suspense—what's gonna happen next?—but rather, it's based on a genuine intrigue in the real lives of real people, their hopes and fears and travails and triumphs. Grisham has always been exemplary in this ability to engage, and this story is no different.
That is, until he writes too much. Which, at points in this book, he does. Almost as if Grisham discovered that life produces so many incredible facets to its every story that a writer could spend the rest of his days trying to exhaust them all and still fail, and he did not possess the shrewdness that comes with experience to let the less crucial ones pass by untold. With confidence I can say that Grisham could have used 75 fewer pages and not lost anything critical to either the story's survival or its poignancy. And thus, at 250 pages, The Innocent Man would have been even better than what it already is, and that is a good book, written by a great author.