Instead, a scene of ultraviolence plays out at her expense, and the protagonist seizes upon the defense of her father's murder trial as an opportunity for personal gain. Aside from screaming out for her father, Tonya Hailey barely says a word throughout the entire novel. The engine of the novel is not necessarily seeking justice for Tonya, whose brutal rape serves as the inciting incident for the rest of the story the engine is Jake Brigance attempting to balance his aspirations as a defense lawyer extraordinaire with his perfect family life and his lustful attraction to his law clerk. He imagined himself, at the time of writing, in the role of Jake Brigance, which tells the reader quite a lot about John Grisham's perspective. Grisham admits in interviews that he wrote the novels as a way of exploring a personal fantasy. But in the light of the present, the novels fall far short of progressivism, especially in terms of representation.
Grisham's novels are an artifact of what it meant to be white and "progressive" in the South merely thirty years ago. Murray goes on to write that "judging by his books (and their movie adaptations), Grisham-like Clinton and Gore-seemed to believe in a newer, more middle-of-the-road kind of Southern leadership, which balanced progressive attitudes about social justice with more regressive ideas about reducing crime and maintaining order." And masses of readers were buying the legal thrillers written by the Mississippi lawyer John Grisham." Murray proposes that this laundry list of political and cultural benchmarks of Southern representation indicates that the compass of mainstream national interest in the early- to-mid-'90s was gradually pointing southward. The sitcom “Designing Women,” set in Georgia, was a staple in the Nielsen Top 10. The Atlanta hip-hop acts TLC, Kriss Kross and Arrested Development were all over the Billboard charts. Noel Murray writes, "In 1993, the country had just put the former Arkansas governor Bill Clinton in the White House, with the former Tennessee senator Al Gore as his vice president. A 2019 New York Times article proposes that John Grisham's success, and the subsequent success of the film adaptations of his best-selling novels, parallel the rise of a "New South," one that promotes progressive virtues and a critical consciousness of the troubling history of the American South, which is still, to this day, haunted by a legacy of racist violence, white supremacy, and slavery.
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