THE MAN with the rubber boots stepped into the elevator behind me, but I didn't see him at first.
The opening line of the book introduces the character that will change everything about the narrator’s life. It is notable that he barely notices the man as that is a defining characteristic of Brock which will gradually transform as a result of his experiences.
“Mister,” he said. Mister was perfectly fine with everyone in the room.
The man with the rubber boots has been asked what he would like to be called by the members of the high-priced law firm he has just taken hostage at gunpoint after quickly letting it be known he did not appreciate being called “pal.” His response of simply “Mister” as well as Michael’s seemingly irony-free acknowledgement that his fellow hostages are good with this is another subtle foreshadowing that the real meat of the matter here is one based on character. While the novel is another “legal thriller” in the usual form of Grisham, the focus is really based on the evolution of the wealthy lawyer Michael Brock’s coming to an understanding that he does not live in the real world inhabited by most Americans. The man’s response is also edged with irony: not caring about his actual name is ironically counterpointed with the fact that “Mister” is a title of respect likely not to be earned by this representative of society among these people without brandishing a weapon.
Privileged people don’t march and protest; their world is safe and clean and governed by laws designed to keep them happy. I had never taken to the streets before; why bother?
This quote could be considered a distillation of the entire novel. Michael Brock is faced with unexpected and uncontrollable circumstances that force—or psychologically coerce at any rate—him leave his privileged bubble and go out into the streets of the real world for the first time. One normally does not associated “street” with lawyers in the same sense that a “street fight” is different from a boxing match. Michael is used to dealing with a world that not only plays by different rules but is populated by the very people wrote those rules for their own benefit. Walking into the world of street law reveals that for most people not only must they play by a different sets of rules, but those rules, too, have been written for them by others.
As an antitrust lawyer, I rarely had to face the clients. Things were different on the street.
The biggest shock that Michael faces, perhaps, is the one inevitably faced by all who dare to step outside their bubble of privilege. It is not just the rules affecting those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder that are different; everything is different. Privilege is a tower constructed on a foundation of laws designed to keep the writers of those laws happy, but when that foundation is taken away the whole thing collapses. Michael’s journey outside his $900,000 a year career as antitrust attorney becomes a revelation that justice really is a system and that system penetrates into literally every aspect of a person’s life. It is only those with the means to exploit every avenue of that system whom it really succeeds in keeping happy.
