‘Monica’s Story’
By Andrew Morton
St. Martin’s Press, $24.95
For those who have not yet had enough of Monica Lewinsky, this book is must-read material. The rest of us might want to take a pass.
The just-released “Monica’s Story” is, of course, the breathless biography of Monica Lewinsky, the intern in her 20s whose sexual affair with President Clinton led to the president’s impeachment. Written by Andrew Morton, author of fawning biographies of Princess Diana, “Monica’s Story” offers a third-person account of the tawdry affair and its aftermath.
To Morton’s credit, he offers just 35 pages of material concerning Monica’s life before Washington, correctly guessing that few readers are interested in her childhood years. Morton launches the reader directly into Monica’s arrival in Washington and her indiscretions with President Clinton. “Monica’s Story,” however, offers almost no salacious detail on the sexual encounters themselves. Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s nearly pornographic report to Congress is the handy guide to cigars, stained dresses and the like.
Indeed, there isn’t much new in this book not already reported or revealed in last week’s interview by Barbara Walters with Lewinsky. Monica arrives as an intern in the White House, is captivated by the president’s “sexuality,” and finds an opportunity to flash her infamous “thong” underwear. They meet in the bathroom of his private study for their more intimate exchanges.
The descriptions of their encounters are striking for the wildly reckless nature of the arrangements. The book reveals the flaws in the two primary characters. Clinton anguishes over his infidelity and struggles to break it off with Monica, only to relapse with a hopeless lack of self-control into more sordid misbehavior. Monica becomes unable to accept that maybe this married man and sitting president might not want to continue the affair.
The most interesting portions of the book concern Lewinsky’s betrayal by her “friend” Linda Tripp and Lewinsky’s brutal treatment by Starr’s agents. Tripp’s treachery is stunning: from taping Lewinsky’s phone calls to pleading with her to prevent the stained dress from being cleaned, to steering Lewinsky to use a delivery service from whom Tripp can secretly obtain copies of invoices for White House deliveries.
Although Lewinsky has been silenced by Starr from discussing her treatment at the hands of Starr’s investigators in her media interviews, she is free from such restrictions in Morton’s book. Held in a hotel room by armed FBI agents and seasoned prosecutors, she is confronted with two choices – “cooperation” by wearing a recording device to ensnare the president, his secretary and his friend Vernon Jordan, or facing prosecution and “27 years” in prison if she leaves the room or consults with her lawyer.
Her repeated requests to talk to her lawyer are refused. But more outrageous is this: her crime at that point was signing a false affidavit. Had she been allowed to contact her lawyer, she could have prevented the filing of the affidavit – a more serious crime.
Had enough? Don’t buy this book. But “Monica’s Story” does provide a voice for a humiliated woman who almost certainly wishes she never got a White House internship and fell in love with a married guy who worked there.
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Monica’s Bio: Scant New Or Salacious Details
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A White House Love Triangle
‘Face-Time’
by Erik Tarloff Crown, $23
Perhaps it is a measure of how far we have come that an entertaining, even funny, novel could be written about illicit sexual affairs in the White House and seem entirely plausible. “Face-Time” answers questions confronting the nation for over a year: How could a seemingly brilliant president have done something so unbelievably stupid? And what on earth could any young woman who agreed to such an arrangement have been thinking?
In “Face-Time,” rising-star political activist Benjamin Krause falls madly in love with beautiful Gretchen Burns, while they work together in the whirlwind of presidential candidate Charles Sheffield’s campaign. When their candidate moves into the White House, both win positions in the new administration: Ben writing speeches and Gretchen to the less prestigious Office of Social Affairs. Things are grand – although Ben does feel bad for Gretchen’s lack of presidential access – until Ben discovers that Gretchen has “access” of a different sort: She is sleeping with the president. Although Gretchen swears her love for Ben, she refuses to end the affair. Caught by the flattering attention of the most powerful man in the world, she is unable to turn away from the ultimate “face-time” with the president. She even accuses Ben of being as jealous of her access to the resident – the ultimate measuring stick of power in the Capitol – as he is of her sexual betrayal.
Ben’s stock rises within the White House with promotions and an endless stream of invitations to state dinners, to the White House theater and to other highly prized social events. But, cuckolded by the ultimate alpha male while at the same time committed to Gretchen, Ben is unable to break it off with Gretchen or quit his position at the pinnacle of power.
The climax of the novel – so to speak – occurs on the Truman Balcony of the White House, where Ben is invited by the president after a dinner. Sweating in the heat, the two talk quietly overlooking Washington. The president compares himself to Churchill and defends Churchill’s personal shortcomings on the grounds of his monumental contributions. “Maybe he needs to be judged on a different scale,” he suggests and then launches into a summary of the various crises around the globe that demand his own attention. When Ben rejects the analogy, the president admits to the affair and urges Ben to get over it. Ben rejects the advice, the president’s comparisons and the notion that those in such positions have any entitlement to such sexual liberties.
The whole novel could have been written for this one confrontation, with the president defending his supposed right to have his way with the women surrounding him and, perhaps more satisfying, his own speech writer talking back. The novel does resolve the triangle, but the denouement is best left undisclosed here.
Written by Erik Tarloff, who himself has worked with the Clinton White House speech-writing staff and is married to Laura D’Andrea Tyson, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during Clinton’s first term, the novel is full of careful detail that brings realism to the writing.
“Face-Time” is an intriguing, thoughtful and sometimes very funny look at an issue that has captured the nation for over a year. The novel provides a useful vehicle to examine how those in powerful positions seem so often to claim the right to take liberties with sexual boundaries that bind the rest of us – and just how easy that sometimes is. -
American Labor, From A To L To Z
‘The Lexicon of Labor’
by Emmett Murray
The New Press, $13.95
“The Lexicon of Labor” is a recently published dictionary of the labor movement in America, inspired by a Washington State Labor Council pamphlet and written by longtime Seattle Times editor Emmett Murray. Organized alphabetically, the small book covers American labor history from A to Z, providing pithy summaries of notable terms, characters and events over the last hundred years.
Some of Murray’s most interesting entries reflect Washington State’s own labor history. Flip to the entries under “C” to find the description of the 1918 “Centralia Massacre,” in which an armed contingent from an Armistice Day parade attacked the union hall of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW – also known as the radical and notoriously violent “wobblies”), resulting in the death of three of the attackers. One of the union men, Wesley Everest, escaped briefly, killing one of his pursuers before capture. Everest was lynched and his body mutilated. The union men were charged with murder and conspiracy and many of them were convicted. None of the attackers were ever charged or jailed.
Under “E,” Murray summarizes the 1916 “Everett Massacre,” a similarly violent – and unjust – confrontation involving the IWW. Arriving in Everett to support a strike, six of the workers were shot down by sheriff’s deputies. Only the workers were charged with murder, but all were acquitted.
Elsewhere, the book covers the basics of the language of labor, from “Boulwarism” to “zipper clauses,” from “impasse” to “salting.”
The book is a handy reference for the newly initiated, but perhaps a bit slow reading for the casual reader. Although at times interesting, it is marred by its relentless union-side political correctness. The labor movement certainly was unfairly and brutally treated over the years, but was hardly without flaws itself. Nonetheless, those committed to the cause are likely to find the book interesting and maybe even worth reading aloud while walking the picket line. -
Questions Of Race And Justice — Ellis Cose Packs A Thoughtful Courtroom Thriller With Issues Of Affirmative Action And The Legal System
‘The Best Defense’
by Ellis Cose
HarperCollins, $24
John Wisocki, a despondent manager about to be laid off by a computer company, gets a gun, writes a suicide note and plans to take his own life in the office of his subordinate – a worker being promoted over him.
Unfortunately, the subordinate suddenly appears, a struggle ensues and the subordinate – not Wisocki – ends up dead.
An awful situation, but it’s even worse: The subordinate, Francisco Garcia, is Hispanic, and the suicide note written by Wisocki, who is white, complains bitterly that Garcia’s promotion was due to his race and to their company’s misguided affirmative-action policies.
It is a tragedy fraught with meaning in our contentious times: Is this a terrible accident by a helpless victim of corporate downsizing – or cold-blooded murder by an embittered racist?
So begins “The Best Defense” (HarperCollins, $24), a thought-provoking new courtroom thriller by Newsweek contributing editor Ellis Cose. It is a novel with special resonance in Washington state, where the November ballot will include Initiative 200, a referendum designed to overturn many affirmative-action measures.
In Cose’s tightly constructed plot, the Hispanic prosecutor, Mario Santiago, sees it as a simple case of racially motivated homicide. Wisocki is charged with murder, though he claims Garcia’s death was accidental.
Squaring off against Santiago is his old flame and former colleague in the prosecutor’s office, Felicia Fontaine. A rising star of the criminal-defense bar, Fontaine views Wisocki as nothing more than an innocent victim of misguided affirmative-action policies who has been charged with a crime he did not commit.
Unfortunately for Fontaine, the case is singled out for heavy-handed attention by self-appointed civil-rights leaders who castigate, threaten, even attempt to seduce Fontaine – who happens to be black – for “selling out” by representing a racist. Even Santiago is treated less as an individual and more like a symbol by his own Hispanic community, which rallies to support the prosecution.
While prosecutor and defense lawyer struggle to stay focused on the case, the media and various interest groups swirl around them, chanting in protest or delivering harsh judgments on the two attorneys’ efforts.
Cose has set his sights higher than simply adding yet another title to the rapidly mounting heap of courtroom thrillers churned out by Grisham, Turow, Martini & Co. The author of several nonfiction works on race relations (“The Rage of a Privileged Class,” “Color-Blind”), he said in a telephone conversation that his intent in switching to fiction was partly to “have fun” – but also to reach a new and different audience as he continues to explore “the intersection of politics, race and law.”
Despite its thriller trappings, this is a formidable first novel. It is crisp, fast-paced and engaging. Best of all, in a genre glutted with lightweight fare, “The Best Defense” reaches higher to explore more complex and important issues.
It does, however, suffer some annoying cliches. Opposing lawyers who are former lovers abound in print, though they are rarely found in the flesh, and the sex scenes scattered throughout this relatively short novel seem perfunctory, unnecessary and are plainly written from a male perspective. In addition, the obligatory plot twist in the epilogue is not terribly surprising.
Yet those issues are minor. At the close of the novel, the reader is left with unsettling questions that may challenge long-held assumptions about some of the most sensitive issues of our time: race relations, affirmative action, diversity, corporate responsibility – and especially the quality of justice, as expressed in American society and its legal system. -
The First Billionaire — Industry And Philanthropy Giant John D. Rockefeller Sr. Is An Unforgettable Original In Biography
‘Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.’
by Ron Chernow
Random House, $30
Good biographies are hard to find, and great ones even rarer. Ron Chernow’s “Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.” is an outstanding biography that commands attention not only because of its outsized subject, but also because of its timely, thoughtful and balanced approach to one of the most significant and controversial lives of the past century.
John D. Rockefeller Sr., who created the Standard Oil Trust, was born in 1839, the son of steadfast Eliza Rockefeller and undependable William Avery Rockefeller, a colorful flimflam man who abandoned his family for months at a time, traveling the countryside passing himself off as a doctor selling patent-medicine “cures.” Unfaithful from the beginning, William had two children by his mistress and eventually married another woman under another identity.
Eliza, in contrast, was a steadying influence in young John’s life, introducing him to the strict Baptist faith he carried throughout his long life (he died in 1937 at age 97). As a young man in Cleveland, Rockefeller stumbled into the business of refining oil into kerosene, which was emerging as an alternative to the more costly natural oils used to light homes. An odd man with extremely demanding and precise habits, Rockefeller seized the initiative in the wildly disorganized Pennsylvania oil fields as well as the local refineries.
Using this powerful leverage over the railroads, he negotiated secret “rebates” that allowed him to lower his costs below anything his competitors could approach. Even those with a geographic advantage found themselves undercut, unaware that secret deals required the railroads to pay “drawbacks” to Rockefeller even when a rival’s oil was shipped on the railroad.
The effect was deadly. His competitors driven to their knees, Rockefeller would buy their refineries out from under them, embrace their executives and move on to the next target. But he stopped short of complete monopoly, allowing a fringe group of competitors to operate while still controlling the market.
This approach to business eventually brought howls of protest from populists, rivals and, ultimately and most dangerously, government lawyers. Rockefeller amassed an astonishing fortune but an even larger reservoir of ill will. As his empire expanded to control nearly 90 percent of the refining industry, the company spilled across borders and developed into one of the nation’s earliest transnational corporations.
Yet after he had made his fortune, Rockefeller turned serious about giving it away. Beset with an avalanche of pleas and petitions, he devoted the same relentless energy and attention to detail to distributing his wealth that he did in building it.
Chernow details the pressure Rockefeller felt as he tried to give away millions of dollars responsibly, ultimately hiring others to assist him and establishing the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913. Largely avoiding individual charity, Rockefeller devoted the bulk of his giving to organizations, founding the University of Chicago and Spelman College, broadly supporting the Baptist Church and temperance leagues, and investing heavily in medical research and public health.
By the 1920s, the Rockefeller Foundation was the largest grant-making institution on earth.
However, Rockefeller made some surprising investment mistakes. Two church acquaintances, Colgate Hoyt and Charles Colby, persuaded him to invest heavily in Everett, Wash., and its surrounding timber stands, where they imagined the Great Northern Railroad terminus would be located. They were wrong, of course. The terminus was Tacoma, and Everett still bears witness to the mistake: Rockefeller, Hoyt and Colby avenues are major streets in that city.
Although Standard Oil was created in an era with few restrictions, the company prompted landmark antitrust legislation and government regulation over railroad rates. A favorite of muckraking journalists writing lurid accounts of its business practices, the company became a favorite target of lawsuits across the nation.
Eventually, the federal government itself filed a massive antitrust suit against Standard Oil under the newly enacted Sherman Antitrust Act, accusing the firm of monopolistic and unfair practices. After a long, bitter fight, the Supreme Court in 1911 affirmed a decision splitting up Standard Oil.
The news reached Rockefeller while he was playing golf with a Catholic priest, whom he advised: “Buy Standard Oil stock.” It was great advice. What was intended as punishment turned into a staggering windfall – Rockefeller’s wealth nearly tripled as the company was divided and its constituent stocks exploded in value.
For today’s reader, the similarities between Rockefeller’s oil empire and Microsoft’s virtual monopoly over computer operating systems are striking. Like Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Rockefeller brought order to a chaotic infant industry, gained a commanding market share of a crucial resource, and made billions of dollars and untold enemies in the process. And like Gates, Rockefeller confronted a federal government intent on curtailing his power.
Gates, whose wealth has surpassed Rockefeller’s even when adjusted to current dollars, would be well-advised to study his predecessor’s life for important lessons: Public opinion matters, philanthropy pays enormous dividends, and even corporate dismemberment is not necessarily a bad thing.
The Rockefeller story is spellbinding, and Chernow – a National Book Award-winner for “The House of Morgan” – is a fine storyteller, carefully working original sources and presenting a balanced portrait of a man who has been vilified as a vicious, unethical monopolist and deified as the patron saint of philanthropy. Whatever the case, John D. Rockefeller Sr. undeniably left a legacy in business, law and philanthropy that continues to outlive him. -
Book Argues Lone Gunman Killed King
‘Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.’
by Gerald Posner
Random House, $25
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by lone gunman James Earl Ray in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968, as King leaned over the balcony of the Lorraine Motel and joked with his staff. The CIA was not involved, nor the FBI, nor any other government agency. Just Ray – and maybe his deranged family – motivated by a $50,000 bounty said to have been posted for the killing.
So says investigative journalist Gerald Posner in his definitive study of the King assassination, “Killing the Dream.” Posner, whose 1993 book, “Case Closed,” demolished conspiracy theories surrounding the murder of John F. Kennedy, now takes aim at that other ’60s-era assassination that remains shrouded in innuendo.
“Killing the Dream” sparks immediate interest from its opening account of the last days of the famed civil-rights leader and his involvement in labor turmoil in Memphis. Cutting back and forth between King and his lieutenants and Ray in his sniper’s nest, Posner accumulates evidence of the assassination, of Ray’s escape to Europe and his final capture by an alert customs agent at London’s Heathrow Airport.
Making of a racist
Posner also details Ray’s sorry life and sordid criminal history. Born into crushing poverty, he was initiated into a life of crime and alcoholism by his father and his career-criminal brothers. Ray absorbed his lessons well, committing numerous armed robberies, earning several prison sentences and developing a prodigious ability for creative alibis. In this environment, Ray’s vicious racism took root early and flourished.
In the 30 years since King’s assassination, conspiracy theories have abounded: that there was a covert team of military snipers in Memphis; that the FBI or CIA were involved; even that the supposed “grassy knoll” gunman from Dallas also killed King.
It is an odd, perhaps uniquely grotesque, feature of American popular culture that King’s assassination, like JFK’s, fostered this cult. Perhaps it is too awful to contemplate that men so powerful and inspiring could be silenced by just one lunatic. Life cannot be this fickle; a dream cannot be so easily stilled.
Posner persuasively demonstrates that Ray, who died April 23 still maintaining his innocence, killed King. He reveals, for example, Ray’s marksmanship training in the military (overlooked by those who claim he couldn’t have made the 207-foot shot), and that the trees near the Lorraine Motel were not cut down until two months after the assassination (not before, to give the assassin a clear view, as conspiracy buffs contend). Most convincingly, he cites innumerable inconsistencies in Ray’s own shifting explanations.
Holes in the theories
After confessing to the crime, Ray later claimed he was an innocent dupe led into the crime by a mysterious man named “Raoul.” By any reasonable measure, the story cannot withstand scrutiny. Why would a sophisticated conspiracy use Ray rather than a skilled hit man? Why risk having him run drugs to Mexico before the murder, as Ray claimed? And why allow Ray to live and threaten disclosure after the deed was done?
The most poignant part of “Killing the Dream” recounts the King family’s belief that some larger conspiracy, even including President Lyndon Johnson, had a part in the killing. It is not difficult to sympathize with their loss – King certainly was subjected to FBI surveillance and outrageous efforts to undermine him – but it takes an unreasonable leap of faith to conclude that he was murdered by any government agency.
Overlooking the compelling evidence of Ray’s responsibility does not advance King’s legacy. Posner’s careful analysis overpowers the various flawed and unsupported theories offered over the years. He pronounces this case closed – and his readers likely will, too. -
The Body Politic Gets Physical In Timely Tale
‘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 Perfect Witness
‘The Perfect Witness’
by Barry Siegel
Ballantine, $24
“The Perfect Witness,” authored by Los Angeles Times reporter Barry Siegel, is a haunting thriller that explores difficult ethical issues with artfully drawn characters caught up in a tangle that pulls even tighter as the story progresses.
Set in La Graciosa, a small coast town in central California, the story revolves around two lawyers, Greg Monarch and Ira Sullivan. The two used to be partners, but Monarch makes a critical and deadly error in a death-penalty case that forever haunts him, and Sullivan drops out of the practice of law to dabble in drugs. When he is arrested one day for murder of the local postmaster, and can’t remember where he was, only Monarch can save him from the chair. But first he must confront his own ghosts, the ambitious and ruthless prosecuting attorney, and the state’s key witness – Sandy Polson, a beautiful pathological liar.
Siegel provokes his characters to explore the boundaries of ethics in pursuit of justice. How far can a lawyer go to present potential false evidence by a “perfect” witness to undermine a conviction achieved by that same witness’ false testimony? Siegel’s exploration of these thought-provoking questions – while telling a cliffhanger of a story – is a rare feat and outstanding entertainment. -
Grisham Shocker: New Book Is A Dud
‘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. -
New Turow `Thriller’ Is A Dud
‘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.