Grisham Steps Out of Courtroom and Into Suburbia for Satire

Take the more slapstick scenes from syrupy Christmas movies like, say, “The Santa Clause.” Add a few Grinch-type moments of holiday resistance predictably overcome, and tie up the story with an ending that aspires to the tear-jerking status of “It’s A Wonderful Life.” You’ll come close to John Grisham’s satirical, ultralight novel, “Skipping Christmas.”

Grisham, the bestselling author of legal thrillers whose fast-paced plots and fiery dialogue have built him a literary following the envy of the publishing world, presumes upon his readers’ loyalty to frolic with age-old Christmas stories in this slight novel. To what end he’s frolicking, though, the reader is never quite sure.

Here’s the premise: Luther Krank is a middle-aged accountant whose only child has just left for a year in Peru with the Peace Corps. Christmas is coming and Luther loathes the idea of the traffic, the crush of shoppers, the holiday hassle in all its forms. Late one night, he crunches the numbers and is aghast to find he and wife Nora flew through $6,100 last year in Christmas-related expenses with little to show. With no child to entertain this year, what’s the point, he reasons and weighs a 10-day Caribbean cruise as an alternative.

Luther tells his plan to Nora, who weeps at the thought of no tree, “though Luther had mercilessly driven home the point that they yelled at each other every Christmas when they decorated the damn thing. And no Frosty on the roof? When every house on the street would have one? Which brought up the issue of public ridicule. Wouldn’t they be scorned for ignoring Christmas?” He and Nora eventually pledge to forgo the holiday this one year and steel themselves for the fallout. What ensues is a funny, if credulity-straining account of the assault the Kranks endure at the hands of their neighbors, co-workers and friends.

The tale of the absent Frosty becomes the book’s humorous highlight. In previous years, a Frosty adorned the roof of every house on Hemlock Street, “an eight-foot Frosty with a goofy smile around a corncob pipe and a black top hat and thick rolls in the middle, all made to glow a brilliant white by a two-hundred-watt bulb screwed into a cavity somewhere near Frosty’s colon.” The Hemlock Frostys, we’re told, had made their debut six years earlier and were a smashing success--”twenty-one houses on one side, twenty-one on the other, the street lined with two perfect rows of Frostys, forty feet up. A color photo with a cute story ran on the front page. Two television crews had done Live! reports.”

This year, as each Frosty is hoisted onto its rooftop perch, the pressure on the Kranks to succumb grows incrementally. First, their lawn is decorated with “Free Frosty” placards, depicting the plastic snowman chain-bound in the Kranks’ basement. Soon, anonymous Christmas cards featuring the icon arrive by the dozen. To inundate the Kranks with holiday joy, their neighbors sic numerous groups of young church carolers onto the recalcitrant couple. They receive crank calls--anonymous voices asking to speak with Frosty--and before long, the newspaper is doing a story on the Kranks’ plan, with a front-page photo of their naked house sticking out on the Frosty-lined street. “I hope they’re satisfied now,” complains one unidentified neighbor in the article. “A rotten display of selfishness,” says another.

Grisham succeeds, in the first half, in convincing readers that Luther Krank’s desire to be unmolested for one December is a valid one. Who among us hasn’t harbored that wish? Had Grisham stuck to that path, the story’s resolution might have been a refreshing “bah-humbug.” But by the time we find ourselves beginning to care whether the Kranks get away with their plan, Grisham throws in the breakneck emergency to create the obligatory Christmas spirit among the neighbors. In doing so, he flip-flops on the book’s premise and spends the latter half of the tale reaffirming the over-commercialization he’s just finished persuading readers is a waste of time.

The book may be a funny little trip down Christmas lane, but it’s little more than that. Without cases to solve, laws to interpret and the nail-biting tension of outrageous odds to overcome, Grisham seems adrift amid his cookie-cutter suburbanite characters, the Christmas cliches he faithfully reproduces and his brand of over-the-top humor, none of which is fresh or terribly interesting. Readers looking for a typical Grisham page-turner may be disappointed. Unless, of course, they’ve just hoisted their own Frostys onto their roofs and want to be reassured that such action--though bothersome--is the right and American thing to do. Those readers will get exactly what they’ve asked Santa for.