Category: Reviews

‘Singing Into the Piano’

by Ted Mooney

Knopf, $25

Ted Mooney’s new novel begins with an improbable but undeniably arresting scene: A young couple attending a crowded political fund raiser engage in a conspicuous sexual act as they listen to Santiago Diaz, a former soccer hero-turned-Mexican presidential candidate, give a speech. Observing the couple from the podium, Diaz is captivated by their recklessness and struggles to complete his speech without breaking his concentration.

When the beautiful young woman leaves her purse behind, Diaz has his staff locate the couple and invites them to breakfast with him and his wife Mercedes, launching a slow-motion dance between the two couples as they are drawn toward each other for different, and not entirely clear, reasons.

Edith, a United Nations translator with a penchant for exhibitionism, and Andrew, her lawyer-boyfriend, are fascinated with the celebrity and intrigue of the fast-moving campaign. Diaz, who recognizes something of himself in Edith and her behavior, and Mercedes are at the same time intrigued by this audacious American couple.

Against a backdrop of South American environmental politics and the Mexican presidential campaign itself, the novel unfolds first in New York, later in Mexico City, and finally on the border between the two countries. Plagued by the high-level defection of the campaign manager, as well as Diaz’s disastrous appearance on an American talk show, the Diaz campaign ultimately succeeds in recovering its footing, but only at a high cost.

Edith and Andrew, standing both literally and figuratively on the border between two worlds, are confronted by violence and ambiguity that runs far deeper than they had imagined. By book’s end, both couples are left amid the wreckage of their expectations.

Mooney’s prose is at once lyrical and annoying. The dialogue is strikingly, almost disturbingly real, but this grace is undermined by the gauzy, vague progress of the novel itself.

The Diaz campaign is populated by largely undefined campaign workers clacking on laptops or whispering into cell phones, but little of this effort appears to interest or involve the candidate himself. Without a definition of the issues for which the candidate stands, or even the politics involved, the violent climax of the novel falls flat.

Moreover, Mooney’s not-so-subtle efforts to draw analogies between sex and politics, while certainly timely and thought-provoking, are incomplete and largely unexplored. “Singing Into the Piano” ultimately fails to live up to its promise, though it does offer flashing dialogue, memorable imagery and engaging writing.

‘The Street Lawyer’

by John Grisham

Doubleday, $27.95

“The Street Lawyer,” John Grisham’s latest in his string of blockbuster lawyer-thrillers, is a disappointing departure from the startling plot twists and cliffhanging suspense that his fans have come to expect.

Perhaps it’s an effort to make this new novel more believable, but if that’s the case, then the cure is almost worse than the disease: “The Street Lawyer” is so predictable that by 50 pages into it you know what is going to happen – and 300 pages later, it does.

The novel – whose first printing of a staggering 2.8 million copies goes on sale nationwide tomorrow – is narrated by Michael Brock, a promising young attorney in a prestigious Washington, D.C., law firm. In the opening scenes, Brock and several colleagues are taken hostage by a homeless man known as “Mister”: he holds them at gunpoint without quite ever demanding ransom or anything in particular, other than the opportunity to berate them for ignoring the poor.

When a police sniper eventually resolves the impasse by putting a bullet through Mister’s head, the hostages are freed. But Brock is intrigued by the man’s monologue, and he soon discovers that Mister recently had been evicted illegally from makeshift apartments in a warehouse that was planned to be sold, razed and redeveloped. And Brock’s firm did the evicting.

His conscience awakened, Brock befriends Mister’s lawyer, Mordecai Green, who introduces him to the world of poverty law and homeless shelters. Before he knows it, Brock is making peanut-butter sandwiches in the shelter, helping homeless clients fight for benefits and meeting real people in hard places.

At one point, he talks with a family with several children, feeding the small boy cookies and helping calm the crying baby at night. Several days later, the entire family is found dead, asphyxiated in their car while trying to stay warm in a snowstorm. When they, too, turn out to have been illegally evicted from the same apartments, Brock quits his job and joins Green fighting for the little guys.

On his way out of his firm, he takes a crucial file relating to the eviction, setting up the primary conflict for the rest of the book. The firm tries everything to get the file back, and Brock tries to use it to sue the development company and their lawyers – his former employers.

This is pretty tough material to forge into a gripping potboiler: two groups of lawyers fighting over a file. No one is shot, few are threatened, and – coming as it does when must-see TV is All Monica All the Time – even the legal maneuverings seem pretty tepid.

Nor does Grisham use the novel to explore the underlying values that are being either violated or protected by his legal protagonists. A casual reader would be hard-pressed to understand why it was so wrong to take the file in the first place, much less the responsibilities a lawyer owes his client – here violated not only by Brock in taking the file and using it to sue his old firm’s client but also by his former partner, who allowed the illegal eviction to occur.

Sadly, “The Street Lawyer” only glances off the surface of this dispute, relying instead on the tired Good Guy-Bad Guy motif to carry the reader’s attention to the end. And even on that level there isn’t much excitement: The climax is a settlement conference between the parties. You try making that exciting.

Indeed, the biggest surprise in the novel is its lack of one. From the end of the opening scene, it is relatively clear what is going to happen: The eviction of Mister will turn out to be wrongful; the firm will be the heavy; and Brock will be the hero. Grisham seems devoted to preaching about homelessness, just as some of his earlier books took on big law firms, big insurance companies and big tobacco companies.

To his credit, Grisham does move the plot along, never a problem in his fiction, and here he adds depth to his central character. Brock’s wife leaves him, he makes mistakes and regrets them, he even reveals a human side on occasion. That alone is an improvement over much of Grisham’s earlier fiction.

Yet those earlier works – like them or not – at least offered suspenseful entertainment. With that stripped away, there isn’t much left here but a thinly predictable plot and a barely concealed lecture on homelessness. You don’t know whether to applaud that Grisham seems to be trying to make his novels into something more than literary pop-tarts, or cry that the end result is much less.

‘The Laws of Our Fathers’

by Scott Turow

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.95

Scott Turow’s new courtroom drama is a 500-page clunker that keeps you hoping until the end for a signature plot twist that might catapult an otherwise tedious book into the realm of great popular literature.

No such luck. Unfortunately, there just isn’t much here to keep you awake nights.

This is surprising because Turow, the author of several bestsellers, including “Presumed Innocent,” is famous for devilish courtroom thrillers that draw on his background both as a federal prosecutor and a partner in a large Chicago law firm. Turow usually combines thoughtful writing with surprising plots. But not here.

In a way, you know what “The Laws of Our Fathers” is like from the moment you open the cover, which emphasizes its focus on the 1960s. Set in Kindle County – the Chicago-like locale of all Turow’s novels – it revolves around a trial for the murder of June Eddgar, the ex-wife of a prominent state senator, who was gunned down near a gang-infested high-rise housing project.

Sonia “Sonny” Klonsky, a character who first appeared in Turow’s “Burden of Proof,” is now the judge presiding over the bench trial – which means that she, not a jury, will decide the guilt or innocence of Nile Eddgar, the son who is accused of plotting the contract killing of his mother. To compound Sonny’s difficulty, virtually everyone involved in the trial knew each other in California in the 1960s, when all were deeply involved in the era’s antiwar protests, riots, campus bombings and hippie life.

Feels like a `Big Chill’

The trial, in fact, is a “Big Chill” reunion of sorts, and the novel relies heavily on flashbacks. Twenty-five years earlier, Judge Klonsky was a college student half-heartedly dating fellow student Seth Weissman, who was desperately in love with her. Weissman provided day care for young Nile Eddgar, the son of faculty revolutionaries Loyell and June Eddgar.

Weissman’s flamboyant African-American friend, Hobie Tuttle, drifted in and out of the Eddgars’ campus underground. But the fabric of these friendships was shredded when Weissman ran from the draft, Sonny refused to join him, the Eddgars were expelled from the faculty, and the FBI began to close in.

More than two decades later, this group reconvenes for a trial in which the charges against Nile are supported by the damning testimony of his father, now a state senator, and Ordell Trent, a drug-dealing gang leader known as “Hardcore” who admits to conspiring with Nile.

Nile, meanwhile, is represented by – surprise! – none other than Hobie Tuttle, now a respected defense lawyer. Tuttle savages the prosecution’s key witnesses with withering cross examinations any lawyer would love, but at the same time he angers Judge Klonsky with his unethical tactics.

Rekindling in Kindle?

Weissman, now a nationally syndicated columnist (who writes for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer), flies into Kindle County to cover the trial. Divorced and recovering from the traumatic death of his young son, Weissman seeks to rekindle his relationship with Sonny Klonsky. She struggles to keep the trial on course, amidst the tangled history of the group and the glare of publicity, while confronting her own feelings for Weissman.

This might have been the foundation for a gripping climax, but Turow resolves the murder trial more than 100 pages before the end of the book, leaving readers in suspense, awaiting one of his patented jaw-dropping plot twists. I’m still waiting.

Instead, a lengthy anticlimax resolves the Klonsky-Weissman relationship, and the reader is left with something which – given Turow’s sparkling literary history – is perhaps more surprising: a dud.

‘The Runaway Jury’

by John Grisham

Doubleday, $26.95

John Grisham, the Old Faithful author of legal thrillers, has cranked out his latest – and one of his best – just in time for summer. Grisham has amassed millions of fans, and sold millions of books, despite frequent criticism that his plots often are absurdly unrealistic.

With “The Runaway Jury,” however, Grisham turns a sharp corner, providing his most credible plot and his most intriguing mystery to date. The novel is a gripping page-turner, exquisitely timed to coincide with rising public concern over smoking and tobacco.

Grisham sets the stage in a Mississippi Gulf Coast town where the widow of a lifelong smoker is suing a cigarette manufacturer for her husband’s untimely death from lung cancer. Armed with a team of high-profile lawyers, each of whom has ponied up a million dollars to fund an all-out assault on the tobacco industry, she is fighting for that crucial first victory that presumably will open the floodgates to a torrent of lawsuits against industry giants.

The tobacco defendants are equally well-armed with slick lawyers, high-priced jury consultants, discreet private investigators and ample cash, all furiously employed to hold back an onslaught of litigation. As in real life, Big Tobacco has won every trial to date, and it has no intention of losing this one.

With such high stakes on both sides of the courtroom, both teams work endless hours preparing for their clash. Both develop detailed dossiers on the potential jurors, probing their backgrounds, investigating their lives, and concocting elaborate theories on jurors’ likely attitudes toward smoking, tobacco and litigation. Consultants on both sides pull down millions in fees for opinions based on potential jurors’ facial expressions, body language and posture.

Worse, each side attempts to influence, bribe, even extort jurors to vote one way or the other. The architect for Big Tobacco’s defense is Rankin Fitch, who has “fixed” juries in prior cases when necessary and arrives for the trial with such preparations well in hand. Unfortunately, Fitch, his clients, and the anti-tobacco plaintiffs are all thrown off balance by the one juror – Nicholas Easter – who remains a mystery to all investigators and consultants.

Things are further complicated when a woman identifying herself as “Marlee” contacts Fitch and demonstrates inside knowledge of the jury – and a ruthless willingness to negotiate. As each of these opponents maneuvers for position, the jury seethes at the trial’s stately pace, the judge struggles to keep the proceedings on track, and the stakes inexorably rise.

Jurors often report feeling like pawns during complex litigation, and Grisham captures this feeling of helplessness with remarkable precision. Grisham’s jury, manipulated by the mysterious Easter, engages in minor acts of rebellion, causing the judge, courtroom staff and all the lawyers to chew their collective fingernails and reach for the antacid.

Unfortunately, “The Runaway Jury” features some of the potholes for which Grisham is famous. Most of the characters are shallow and undeveloped. For example, the attorneys – usually the stars of courtroom dramas – are little more than background shrubbery here; their conduct, motives and ethics all could have provided depth and color, but Grisham opts for the easy approach of drawing them as cynical, cliched cutouts. And Grisham’s ultimate twist – not to be disclosed here – is a bit predictable, though it could easily have been more provocative and devilish.

Grisham and all of his books, moreover, could benefit immensely from an infusion of humor, a quality sorely lacking in this self-important potboiler.

But even with these nits, “The Runaway Jury” is far and away Grisham’s most addictive courtroom thriller. He packs the book with distilled nuggets of testimony and arguments about tobacco-company liability for smoking-induced cancer deaths – an effort that could easily have sunk the book in a mire of detail and posturing. Instead, it adds a crucial texture of realism that immeasurably helps the novel.

Grisham’s publisher has opened sales of “The Runaway Jury” with 2.8 million copies in print, and it is virtually assured of being a summertime blockbuster and airport-rack staple even before its eventual paperback release. Hollywood is sure to follow, with Tom Cruise and Demi Moore waiting to learn their parts.

And Big Tobacco, long accustomed to the threats of Congress, the courts and the Food and Drug Administration, might finally have met its match.