72 pages • 2-hour read
The Client
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Themes
The Effects of Childhood Trauma
Childhood trauma is a significant component of Grisham’s novel. The theme is expressed in two different ways through the brothers, Mark and Ricky, at the center of its narrative. The two boys (aged 11 and eight respectively) were thrust into the horrific situation of witnessing Romey’s suicide, but the Sway brothers have tragic backstories as well, growing up with an abusive father and largely absent single mother who must work long hours to provide for her children. Other events in the novel worth mentioning here are the burning of the Sway family’s mobile home and Mark being locked up by Judge Harry Roosevelt. These two events reflect how the Sway brothers not only encountered trauma in their past but encounter cumulative trauma throughout The Client. Mark and Ricky thus have layers of childhood trauma that they are forced to grapple with in the novel. Grisham is not only recognizing the existence of children being thrust into unfair, harmful, and dangerous situations, but he also meditates on the physical, mental, and emotional repercussions that traumatic encounters leave on children.
Mark’s younger brother Ricky serves as a clear expression of the physical effects that trauma can have on children. After the two boys witness Romey’s graphic suicide, Ricky devolves into a comatose state. He is incapable of speaking or even acknowledging others’ presence; he withdraws completely, curling up on the Sway family’s couch and sucking his thumb. His act of curling up into a fetal position, alongside the thumb sucking, suggests that Ricky was so traumatized by the events of the day that he regresses to a wholly infant state. Incapable of speaking or doing anything, Ricky’s mind and body “check out” as a defensive mechanism. This allows Ricky to protect himself from encountering any more emotional burdens. Being in an infantile state also forces those around Ricky to care for him. While Dianne Sway is usually away from her boys at work, Ricky’s regression means that she is forced to be by his bedside and be present as a mother. Grisham thus employs Ricky as an embodiment of the physical effects that trauma can have on a child.
The novel’s protagonist, Mark, illustrates the other side of the coin in the theme of the effects of childhood trauma. Mark’s maturity for his age (including some questionable attempts at maturity, such as smoking) is the first character trait readers encounter in The Client. Indeed, the very first sentence of the novel describes Mark’s smoking habits, and soon after Grisham explicitly lays out that:
[h]e was more mature than any kid his age. He’d always been mature. He had hit his father with a baseball bat when he was seven. […] There had been many fights and many beatings, and Dianne Sway had sought refuge and advice from her eldest son (5).
Here, readers learn quickly that Mark is not only a remarkably mature child, but he has even been forced to inhabit the role of providing emotional support—and even guidance—for his own mother. Notably, one of the most infamous indicators of childhood trauma is the quality of being overly mature for one’s age. Grisham himself makes the link between childhood trauma and its effect of fast maturation in the above quote on Page 5. The author describes the incident where Mark was forced to fight off his own father with a bat as a seven-year-old boy, then immediately transitions to reflecting on how Mark is his mother’s guide and confidante. Mark’s trauma forces him to essentially be his own father at the age of 11. It is this traumatic backstory—and the maturity that it lends—that prepares Mark to successfully navigate the complex scenario involving Romey, Barry the Blade, Roy Foltrigg, and Reggie Love.
Importantly, Grisham does not write Mark as a perfectly mature character. In efforts to construct and emphasize his theme of the effects of childhood trauma, there are periodic scenes of Mark breaking down in tears. There are brief moments where Mark is so exhausted by his ordeal that he lets his guard down and cries. Most of the time, it is in front of Reggie, suggesting how deeply he trusts the lawyer. For instance, in the very next chapter following their argument over whether to intervene in the recovery of Senator Boyette’s body, Mark is finally able to process what happened and breaks down crying next to Reggie in their motel room. These juxtaposed scenes draw readers’ attention to the unfair duality that can occur in traumatized children. Kids like Mark are at once forced to leave their childhoods behind and grow up inordinately fast to survive. Even still, they are merely children, and they do not have the capacity to cope with the burdens and issues that adults can. With his theme exploring the different physical, mental, and emotional effects of childhood trauma, Grisham establishes the ultimate tragedy at the heart of The Client: while Mark may be able to navigate extremely intense situations, he is still merely a scared, traumatized child.a
Exploring Who Truly Fights for Justice
A significant thread woven throughout The Client is the interrogation of who truly fights for justice. Most of the characters in Grisham’s novel can be split into two camps: those who purport to fight for justice and are merely using their roles in the criminal justice system for selfish reasons, and those who are genuinely committed to achieving justice. Notably, the characters in the latter camp are significantly fewer in number versus the former category. The tensions between these two types of character defines the drama of The Client. Through his story’s cast of lawyers, FBI agents, and judges, Grisham critiques the American justice system and the types of personalities who are drawn to working in it. He also uses his protagonist, Mark, to suggest that justice is truly achieved by those working outside the system. Grisham thus uses The Client’s interrogation of who truly fights for justice to communicate that the American criminal justice system is broken.
Grisham first begins to build this theme in Chapter 6, when Mark sees a lawyer named Gill Teal combing the hospital cafeteria for potential clients. Grisham purposefully draws a contrast between Mark’s impression of Gill Teal and Reggie Love. Whereas Mark believes Gill Teal must be an exceptional lawyer because of his rampant ad campaign and TV appearances, he is skeptical of Reggie’s skills because she does not appear in the Yellow Pages. As he waits in Reggie’s office before their first meeting, Mark thinks to himself, “Reggie Love was not [in the Yellow Pages]. What kind of lawyer was she? […] But then there was Gill Teal, the one for real, the people’s lawyer, the star of the Yellow Pages who also had enough fame to get himself on television” (93). Press is also important to another important law professional in The Client: US Attorney J. Roy Foltrigg. Foltrigg is established as a prideful attorney who is constantly chasing favorable headlines. He obsessively engages with the press throughout the book. Among the most revealing detail of Foltrigg’s character comes at the beginning of Chapter 7, where Grisham writes, “A small library in the US Attorney’s suite had been converted to a press room, complete with floodlights and a sound system. Roy kept makeup in a locked cabinet” (77). The details are important in Grisham’s description; one will note that Foltrigg exchanged his legal library for a press room, symbolizing his prioritization of notoriety over justice. It is one of the novel’s ultimate ironies that Foltrigg’s nickname “the Reverend” is given to Foltrigg because of the theatrical lectures he gives to the press on the importance of fighting for justice, yet his pride and ego stand in the way of that very fight. Indeed, it is notable that Foltrigg is one of the main antagonists of the novel, accompanied in the harassment of Mark only by the very mobster Foltrigg is hunting down. Grisham’s decision to situate a District Attorney alongside a violent mobster illuminates his intention with The Client and its critical eye on who truly fights for justice in the United States.
The one truly just lawyer at the core of his novel, Reggie Love, is one of the only characters in the story to be completely unconcerned with press, publicity, and profit. She routinely takes pro bono cases, like Mark’s, and uses her position as a lawyer to advocate for those who cannot advocate for themselves. Notably, despite her honorable character, she is an outsider from many of the other characters in the novel who work in the criminal justice system. Those characters like Roy Foltrigg never understand—and often, openly patronize—Reggie’s legal philosophy and career. For these characters, Reggie’s expertise in defending children is laughable because it will not lead to high profits or significant career gain. Grisham thus draws a distinct line between Reggie’s commitment to Mark and finding justice for the Swift family and those like Gill Teal and Roy Foltrigg, who use the law for personal career gains and are largely unconcerned with lofty ideals of justice.
Most important of all is that amongst this wide range of characters who work in the legal system, it is a child, who lies outside of it all, who fights for justice most virulently. From Mark’s introduction in the first chapter, where readers witness him fight to stop Romey’s suicide, to the novel’s final part where he insists to Reggie that they must intervene in the mob’s recovery of Senator Boyette’s body, Grisham establishes his protagonist as a child with a clear moral vision and commitment to doing what is right. Grisham uses Mark in contrast to characters in the legal system to emphasize that these moral qualities rarely exist in legal professionals. One of the most important chapters in relation to this theme is Chapter 37, where Mark argues with Reggie to stop Muldanno’s recovery of Senator Boyette’s body. It is one of the most essential scenes not only in establishing Mark’s remarkable composure and maturity but also in illustrating his morality. Mark insists that he and Reggie have a duty to intervene. Reggie insists, “They beat us. It’s all over. They win,” to which Mark responds, “We can’t let them take the body, Reggie. Think about it. If they get away with it, it will never be found” (442). An essential component to this scene is the concept of 11-year-old Mark standing up to an attorney and lecturing her on the importance of justice. Here, Grisham uses Mark’s argument with Reggie as a symbolic manifestation of Mark’s larger-scale confrontation with the justice system that lies at the heart of the novel. Throughout The Client, Mark is consistently standing up to members of the criminal justice system (e.g., cops, lawyers, judges, etc.) and, through both his actions and words, showing them what it is to truly fight for justice. Mark is thus an embodiment of one of The Client’s most important themes.
How the Criminal Justice System Fails the American People
One pertinent scene of The Client may seem out of place at first, but upon closer inspection, one will note the important role it plays in the novel’s establishment of how the criminal justice system fails the American people. This scene comes in Chapter 15, when Mark has a private conversation with Reggie’s assistant, Clint. Mark tells Clint of his traumatic past with his abusive father, describing how he eventually wants to hunt his father down and fight him in revenge for all the times he beat Mark and Ricky. When Clint warns Mark that he could go to jail for doing so, Mark replies, “He didn’t go to jail when he beat us. He didn’t go to jail when he stripped my mother naked and threw her in the street with blood all over her” (178). This scene highlights how men like Mark’s abusive father get away with brutal acts in the United States every single day, informing Grisham’s theme that the criminal justice system fails those who need it most. The scene also emphasizes Mark’s experience with the legal system’s inability to achieve true justice, illuminating his distrust of law enforcement, the FBI, and judges throughout the novel.
Even Reggie herself fails to fight for justice for Mark at one point. In Chapter 23, when she insists that he must reveal the location of the Senator’s body because he cannot lie on the stand, she does not stand up for Mark and does not defend her client’s desires to keep his family safe. At perhaps his most vulnerable moment, Reggie abandons Mark to fend for himself. Mark’s subsequent refusal to bend to the court’s pressure in Chapter 25 lands Mark—a mere child—in jail. Here, Grisham suggests that even though Reggie is following the law and the rules of America’s justice system by telling her client he cannot lie, she is still perpetuating an injustice. These few chapters dealing with this subplot of Judge Henry’s courtroom, Mark’s incarceration, and Reggie are among the most important to the novel’s theme exploring who truly fights for justice. Readers are confronted with the unjust paradox that, by following the law, Reggie has contributed to the incarceration of an innocent child. Despite Reggie being the most just of all the legal professionals in The Client, this subplot involving her abandonment of Mark in his most pressing time of need embodies Grisham’s suggestion that the American justice system is, in fact, unjust.
Grisham, in ending his novel before the conclusion of the Muldanno murder case, leaves the criminal subplot of The Client open ended. This theme critiquing the function and effectiveness of the American criminal justice system prompts readers to reflect on characters like Roy Foltrigg and decide whether they will truly be capable of achieving justice in the case of Senator Boyette’s murder—especially because, by the novel’s end, they are no longer receiving the aid of Mark.
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