Damn, you’ll be impressed
Four bolts from the blue: two fiction, too real
In John Grisham’s second novel (albeit his first to gain widespread acclaim), The Firm, we follow the adventures of Mitch McDeere and his young wife as he embarks on a legal career with the Memphis law firm of Bendini, Lambert & Locke.
At his interview, which unusually is conducted in a hotel room and for which Mitch has prepared thoroughly, he meets managing partner Royce McKnight, associate Lamar Quin and senior partner Oliver Lambert, not having had the first idea who would be in the room when he pitched up at the relevant time. The conversation covers Mitch’s academic background, his family and wife, his football playing prowess and knee-injury, when, all of a sudden, one of the lawyers fires off an unexpected jibe.
“How’d you make straight A’s and play football?”
“I put the books first.”
“I don’t imagine Western Kentucky is much of an academic school,” Lamar blurted with a stupid grin, and immediately wished he could take it back. Lambert and McKnight frowned and acknowledged the mistake.
“Sort of like Kansas State,” Mitch replied. They froze, all of them froze, and for a few seconds stared incredulously at each other. This guy McDeere knew Lamar Quin went to Kansas State. He had never met Lamar Quin and had no idea who would appear on behalf of the firm and conduct the interview. Yet, he knew. He had gone to Martindale-Hubbell’s and checked them out. He had read the biographical sketches of all of the forty-one lawyers in the firm, and in a split second he had recalled that Lamar Quin, just one of the forty-one, had gone to Kansas State. Damn, they were impressed.
The fictitious Lamar Quin wasn’t even a partner of that fictitious law firm.
Lamar Quin was thirty-two and not yet a partner. He had been brought along to look young and act young and project a youthful image for Bendini, Lambert & Locke …
Damn, I was impressed! Of course, Mr Grisham is a master at contriving realistic scenarios based on his experience as a legal practitioner, and his novels are, it must be borne in mind, fiction, so he can embellish them as he wishes. But, it makes for a good read.
Tom Cruise plays Mitch McDeere in the 1991 film adaptation of The Firm, and Cruise also partners up with Dustin Hoffman in the earlier film Rain Man. In that film, the two play brothers, of whom Hoffman is institutionalised as being autistic, and Cruise is a high-flying executive. A family death contrives to bring them together and at one point they land in a strange town, where they stay at a motel with nothing particular as reading material to pass the time. They decide to go and eat at a local diner and are served by a waitress named Sally Dibbs, which we know because her name’s displayed on the tag she’s wearing. Hoffman sees it and spontaneously recites aloud the lady’s telephone number. Yeah, you guessed it: Ray has read the phone book, at least down to the letter “G”, and, upon encountering Miss Dibbs in person, he immediately remembers her phone number. She doesn’t seem that amused, but meanwhile Charlie is hatching a plan. We still need to remember that this is fiction, but it’s not outrageously unbelievable fiction: many of us had our first encounter with autism when this film came out in 1988.
The reason I was reminded of this passage of Grisham’s novel and the diner scene from Rain Man is an article in the Guardian by author and journalist Emmanuel Carrère, of which an excerpt follows. At this point in his narrative, Carrère is one of a number of journalists travelling with Emmanuel Macron on the French presidential aircraft and has been invited for a chat in the flying business lounge. If, like me, you were impressed by the fictitious bolts from the blue in The Firm and in Rain Man, wait till you read this similar thunderbolt from reality:
There came a moment in this flow of cinematic and literary erudition when talk came around to the upcoming adaptation of The Wizard of the Kremlin, Giuliano da Empoli’s novel about Putin’s eminence grise Vladislav Surkov, for which I wrote the screenplay with film-maker Olivier Assayas. Jude Law plays Putin, and I took out my phone to show PR [le président de la République] a photo of him in the role. “Not bad,” Macron said, handing me back my phone, and for a moment I got the feeling he was annoyed that Jude Law is portraying Putin and not him. But why, he asked, did I write the screenplay? Why not Giuliano? (He said “Giuliano”.) I replied that the author of a book isn’t necessarily the best person to adapt it for the cinema, he lacks distance, I myself don’t collaborate on adaptations of my books. Macron raised an eyebrow: “But you adapted Class Trip with Claude Miller, didn’t you?”
Now what you have to know is that Class Trip, based on my novel of the same name, came out almost 30 years ago. I think it’s a beautiful film but it wasn’t a success, critically or commercially. If you did a survey of 10 of my friends maybe one or two would have seen it, and aside from my agent who drew up the contract, none would be able to say whether or not I collaborated on the screenplay. “No surprise there,” people say when I tell them this anecdote about PR, “he’s given notes on everyone he talks to, that’s all.” No. Or if that’s the explanation, it’s even more remarkable than the fact itself. Assuming Macron took the time to review a file on me, it would have to be 15 pages long to include a detail like that.
Amazed, I asked: “How on earth do you know that?”
He replied: “I sleep little but well. That leaves me time to watch films.”
Here’s one from my own personal experience. Between 1996 and 2013, I worked as a translator for the tax firm Coopers & Lybrand, which, in 1998, merged to become Pricewaterhouse Coopers (today it’s simply PwC). My work involved French, Dutch and German translations into English, and reviewing English texts written by staff members in the area of client correspondence, books, articles, marketing materials and the like. One of my tasks was to translate and coordinate a regular printed publication dealing with the latest developments in Belgian taxation. It rejoiced in the somewhat pedestrian title of Tax Newsletter.
One day, a friend and colleague translator paid a courtesy visit to the translators’ office at our premises in Sint-Stevens-Woluwe, just outside Brussels. After enjoying some light hospitality and exchanging views and experiences, the visit ended and I escorted my friend down to the lobby area, where one of the receptionists kindly called a taxi for her. It would take a few moments to arrive, so we sat down and chatted on the opulent leather sofas in the reception atrium, where another of the firm’s clients was waiting patiently for his own meeting. He seemed to take a casual interest in our conversation, but said nothing. Presently, the receptionist advised that the taxi had arrived, and I accompanied my guest to the front door and into the car, and waved her off. When I returned to retrieve my papers, the gent waiting on the sofas asked me, “Are you Graham Vincent?” to which I replied, “Yes. How so?” Then he floored me: “You edit the Tax Newsletter, don’t you?”
As with the other such bolts from the blue, I need to fill you in. The Tax Newsletter went out once a month, maybe every two months, and was sent in those early days in paper form to clients who’d expressed an interest in receiving it. The colophon of contributors was on the back cover, just a list of names. To even have seen my name, you needed to have subscribed, received the publication, and actually read it, including the back page, and then remembered those names when you happened to hear one of them mentioned in a conversation overheard in the issuing firm’s lobby.
For a while, I felt a little like Sally Dibbs. And, like her, I wasn’t entirely sure whether I was amused.
Bonne nuit, everyone.