http://www.washingtonpost.com/
At the start of “Gray Mountain,” John Grisham’s angry and important new novel, Samantha Kofer — age 29, Washington native, graduate of Georgetown and Columbia Law — is a third-year associate at a huge New York law firm. She works 100 hours a week, doing boring chores that she hates, but she’s earning $180,000 a year and expects to be a $2 million-a-year partner by age 35.
Or she did expect that, until September 2008, when the economy tanked and panicked law firms began ridding themselves of associates and partners. We meet Samantha at the moment — “day ten after the fall of Lehman Brothers” — when the ax falls for her, with only one consolation offered. If laid-off associates will agree to intern with a nonprofit agency, they can keep their health benefits and will be considered for rehiring if prosperity returns. Thus it is that Samantha finds herself at the Mountain Legal Aid Clinic in tiny Brady, Va., in the heart of Appalachia.
That opening scene, wherein a world of privilege abruptly vanishes for astonished young people who have known only success, is startling, but no more than Grisham’s portrait of the world of poverty and injustice that Samantha soon enters. The author does justice to the physical beauty of Appalachia and to the decency of most of its people, but his real subject is the suffering inflicted on those people by mining companies and politicians who pander to them.
Samantha’s new boss, Mattie Wyatt, has kept the Mountain Legal Aid Clinic alive for 26 years. The first case she assigns to Samantha is that of a woman who needs protection from a husband who deals in crystal meth and beats her. Then Samantha moves on to her first black-lung case. If miners can prove they’ve been disabled by years of breathing coal dust, they’re entitled to payments that can reach $1,000 a month.
The problem is that Big Coal employs hordes of lawyers to delay cases until the miner dies or gives up, and the lawyers are often backed by doctors, prosecutors, judges and regulators who are in bed with the coal companies. Mattie warns that only 5 percent of miners with black lung receive benefits. That doesn’t stop Samantha from championing one dying miner — and learning how heartbreaking that can be.
Mattie has a nephew, a good-looking young lawyer named Donovan Gray who’s pursuing a one-man crusade against Big Coal. Grisham dramatizes two of his cases in detail. Both involve the form of strip mining often called mountaintop removal.
For the rest of this article, click here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/book-review-john-grishams-gray-mountain/2014/10/19/3a9f2bea-4fdf-11e4-babe-e91da079cb8a_story.html