Just Finished Reading The Rooster Bar by John Grisham

The Rooster Bar, a 2017 legal fiction novel by John Grisham, examines the world of for-profit schools, in particular law schools. Mark, Todd, Zola, and Gordon are all classmates at seedy Foggy Bottom Law School in Washington, D.C., racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt while soon to receive essentially worthless degrees. In the meantime, their school has done little to prepare them for the bar exam needed for them to legally practice law, so they are looking ahead at a mountain of debt with little-to-no means of paying it back.  Gordon, Zola's boyfriend, is the first to crack up, and with his bipolar personality has constructed an elaborate conspiracy theory around a reclusive investor who has gained control over eight for-profit law schools, including Foggy Bottom.  His friends try to save him in his crisis, intervening to look for his doctor, but to no avail with a tragic end.  Now it is just Mark, Todd, and Zola...she is distracted by the fact that her entire Senegalese family has been arrested and are to be deported back to Africa.  After seeing how some lawyers hang around courtrooms and offer their services to different accused parties without their legal credentials ever being called into question, Mark hits upon the idea of winging it as a lawyer and Mark and Zola join him, leaving Foggy Bottom and taking on new identities.  The story develops from there as they naively stumble through one foolish mistake after another.  With all that is going against them, their situation seems more and more hopeless.  Yet...

The last ongoing prime time television series that I followed while it was going on was The Pretender, where Jared, an escapee from a school for specially gifted children, successfully takes on different roles, even once as a surgeon.  The Rooster Bar is something like that, although Mark, Todd, and Zola in the end come out looking comically clueless in their endeavors to hoodwink those around them.  But they are very sympathetic characters and I (hope to) to see them in another Grisham novel: a sequel is in order here.  As for the staggering student loan situation in this country, it is bad enough with the legitimate schools. But these for-profit institutions strike me as legalized con rackets and should be much more tightly regulated and scrutinized...