A Scrooge for our times

It's just before Christmas and accountant Luther Krank (a name chosen to imply, with subtle cunning, that he might be something of a crank), totting up the year's household expenses, discovers that Yuletide the previous year cost him $6,100 - no less than nine per cent of his adjusted gross.

This year, he resolves, he and his wife Nora will replace the festivities with a Caribbean cruise: there's nothing to keep them at home now that their daughter Blair is in Peru with the Peace Corps.

Their decision causes astonishment among friends, neighbours and the inhabitants of the little town in which they live but, despite blandishments, blarney and blackmail, they tough it out. Until, that is, Blair rings from Miami airport to say she's coming home with a handsome Peruvian fiance and wants to show him a typical American family Christmas.

While Luther steals a tree and struggles to put Mr Frosty on the roof, Nora scours the town unavailingly for festive fare and, with equal lack of success, rings round their friends to invite them to their usual Christmas Eve party.

It looks as if Enrique might be in for a disappointment. However, the neighbours, exuding goodwill by the pint, rescue the situation: the party, enlivened by Enrique's Peruvian folk songs, is the best ever - though Luther slips away for a minute to present the cruise tickets to a friend whose wife has just learnt she has cancer.

John Grisham made his name with a series of novels - The Firm set the pattern - in each of which some puny young David takes on and bests a corporate Goliath. And, for a moment in Skipping Christmas, the reader is seized by an emotion akin to the wild surmise felt by stout Cortez's men on a peak in Darien: can it be that Grisham is about to take on the biggest Goliath of all and actually trash Christmas? Alas, he chickens out, and postmodern irony skulks sullenly away, leaving the field clear for a rerun of A Christmas Carol. Scrooge! the neighbours' well-read (or have they just seen the Bill Murray film?) kids yell at Luther, which achieves the impossible feat of rating higher on the glutinous sentimentality index than the original.

Skipping Christmas will undoubtedly form the bedrock of a multitude of stockings this year: immediate recycling is advised.