Best-selling novelist Scott Turow had every reason to revere Saul Bellow. Growing up in Chicago in the 1950s, Turow had spent his youth in thrall to nineteenth-century European classics—at home with infected tonsils at the age of eleven, he had devoured Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo in a three-day fever dream of reading, and later soaked up most of Dickens—but as a young man he had worked hard to transform himself into a card-carrying modernist. As an aspiring novelist at Amherst College in the late 1960s and, later, as a fellow and lecturer at Stanford University’s Creative Writing Center, Turow charted the firmament of American literary fiction with Bellow as one of his lodestars.
“I wanted to write novels that could be read by bus drivers as well as English professors, and enjoyed by both. Both would find them involving, both would be able to take something of substance from them. That, to me, is great art.”
He studied Seize the Day, The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, and Herzog with something like Talmudic rigor. His interest in Bellow was deepened, naturally, by the latter’s prominence among writers associated with his hometown, including Theodore Dreiser, James T. Farrell, Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Nelson Algren—a pantheon that Turow may have permitted himself to dream of joining one day. Also, both he and Bellow were Jewish, and although Turow was unaware of it, there was even a connection between their families. (He grew up hearing his father referring to “the Bellows,” but didn’t relate those references to the novelist until many years later, when he discovered that Bellow and the elder Turow had gone to high school together in Chicago.)
But by the time Bellow won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976—the year after Turow left Stanford to enroll, fatefully, at Harvard Law School—Turow had come to regard the author as the leading exemplar of a literary tradition whose values and assumptions he’d begun to question. One issue was its elitism. Some of Turow’s Stanford professors and colleagues had been fond of quoting Ezra Pound’s dictum that “artists are the antennae of the race.” That rankled Turow, and he shot back that art was about evoking universals, not dividing people. “I said I wanted to write novels that could be read by bus drivers as well as English professors, and enjoyed by both,” Turow, sixty-one, recalls in the offices of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, the Chicago law firm where he has been a partner for the past two decades. “Both would find them involving, both would be able to take something of substance from them. That, to me, is great art.”
The other element of modernism from which Turow recoiled was its disdain for plot. In Bellow’s case, the result was a body of work that, while adept at excavating the deepest caves of human consciousness, was notably static. “Even though the sensibility and the spectacular language in his work were very important to me, I was beginning to say to myself, ‘There’s nothing happening in these books,’” he says. “The plot of every Bellow novel can be summarized in one sentence, and a short one: A guy wanders around. But I came to feel that if Henry James was right—and he is, unquestionably—that you should show, not tell, then what the novel could do for readers had to be anchored in its action. Moses Herzog, with all his communication with the great minds of the past and present—that won’t do it. Lectures on Spinoza won’t do it. The moral evolution of a character is not accomplished in his letters or his speeches. It’s in what he does, in his confrontation with other human beings. Something has to happen.
And so it came to pass that in Turow’s nine novels, from the blockbuster Presumed Innocent (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987) to its long-awaited sequel, Innocent, published this month by Grand Central, a multitude of things happen: professional rivalries that lead to abuses of the legal system; bribery and theft associated with public corruption; and various crimes of passion, including illicit affairs, suicide, and murder. And it’s primarily through these events that Turow’s books reveal the interior lives of their interrelated and often recurring characters, including prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, detectives, law clerks, journalists, witnesses, and defendants caught up in proceedings in the courts of Kindle County, a midwestern metropolis very like Chicago.
Between his fiction-writing career’s current bookends, both of which focus on the private and public travails of the prosecutor (and later judge) Rozat “Rusty” Sabich, Turow’s novels include The Burden of Proof (FSG, 1990), an introspective study of defense attorney Alejandro “Sandy” Stern, a master courtroom tactician who nonetheless struggles to come to terms with his wife’s decision to take her own life; Pleading Guilty (FSG, 1993), Turow’s closest brush with the hardboiled tradition of Raymond Chandler, in which the half-comic, half-tragic attorney Mack Malloy investigates the disappearance of one of his law partners and more than five million dollars of a client’s money; and The Laws of Our Fathers (FSG, 1996), Turow’s densest and most experimental novel, partly set in a drug-infested, gang-ridden public housing project and featuring a trial whose major players are connected by their shared history amid the revolutionary tumult of the 1960s. His other major books are Personal Injuries (FSG, 1999), in which a charming scoundrel named Robbie Feaver is forced to expose a series of corrupt judges; Reversible Errors (FSG, 2002), in which defense attorney Arthur Raven works doggedly to exonerate a man he believes was wrongly convicted of murder; Ordinary Heroes (FSG, 2005), set largely away from Kindle County in Europe during World War II; and Limitations (Picador, 2006), a short novel commissioned by and originally serialized in the New York Times.
The books are best known for their crackling courtroom scenes, which grip the reader with the lawyers’ complex and sometimes Machiavellian tactics, the triumphs and setbacks of their legal combat, and the subtle currents of feeling—fear, anger, grim satisfaction, relief, and flashes of ambivalence—that ebb and flow among the various stakeholders. What’s surprising, and far less commented upon, is the way the books just as often subvert and sometimes flatly confound the expectations of readers looking for another nail-biting legal thriller in the mold of works by, say, John Grisham or Richard North Patterson. The stories in about half the books, for example, unfold mostly outside courtrooms. And, unlike most in their genre, Turow’s novels almost never proceed in linear fashion, each page and chapter propelling the reader forward to the next. Instead, they’re often as discursive as Bellow’s, consistently (and sometimes perversely) interrupting their own momentum through the use of multiple narrators, subplots, time frames, and ruminations that bear obliquely or not at all, at least initially, on the main plot. “Scott is a master at getting the reader very involved in the primary story and then pulling away from it,” says Deb Futter, editor in chief at Grand Central and Turow’s editor on Innocent. “At first you think, ‘He’s got to get back to the main story,’ but then you get wrapped up in the secondary story. It’s a juggling act that really works.”
In some cases, these seeming interludes, which typically focus on character relationships, gradually reveal themselves as the novel’s true through-line. In Personal Injuries, for example, the chapters about the developing bond between Robbie and Evon, the undercover agent assigned to monitor him, eventually overshadow the bribery sting that is the novel’s ostensible subject. Something similar happens in Reversible Errors, in which the emotional entanglements between two couples on either side of a legal case come to engage the reader far more than their increasingly frantic attempts to prove a condemned man’s guilt or innocence.
Where other writers in his putative peer group are addicted to cliff-hanger chapter endings in the manner of the movie serials of the 1930s, Turow generally eschews such devices. Instead, he’s a master of the dying fall, passing up the chance to manipulate the reader into turning the page in favor of finishing off a chapter with quiet finality and poignancy. And while what his characters do is important, so is why it’s done—what past events led to it, and how personal histories keep rippling concentrically into the present. The ripples often manifest themselves as a series of ethical quandaries that pose complex, morally ambiguous, ultimately existential questions.
“If someone asked me what kind of fiction Scott writes, I would never say ‘commercial fiction’ and I would never say ‘literary fiction,’ because either way, it just seems too simplistic,” says Gail Hochman, who has been Turow’s agent throughout his fiction-writing career. “He wants an exciting plot that has all the thrills of a roller coaster, but he also wants characters with a lot more layers, more levels, more meaning than in the typical commercial novel. He doesn’t do heroes and villains; he doesn’t do stock characters from central casting.”
In short, if reading the average legal potboiler from the airport bookstall is a task easily accomplished on the redeye to the opposite coast, reading Turow requires significant commitments of time, concentration, imaginative engagement, and human sympathy. But this often goes unacknowledged. Turow is widely hailed as the greatest practitioner of the legal thriller—a genre he was instrumental in popularizing and whose popularity has helped him sell more than thirty million books—but he’s less often credited as a serious writer who, far from jettisoning his literary ambitions in a rush to the bank, combines the modernist pursuit of the revelation of human character with the intricate, sometimes contrapuntal and always immersive narrative structures associated with novels of the latter half of the nineteenth century.
It’s notable that when Presumed Innocent was first published and Turow was asked about its influences, he answered with a single name: Charles Dickens. “At Stanford I don’t think there was much discussion about literary versus popular fiction, because the assumption was that popular fiction was largely trash,” he says now. “At the time, Dickens was one of those writers who had just begun to cross over the divide into the academy. Thirty years earlier, his books were regarded as trash.”
Turow’s brow, normally knitted as he concentrates on his answers, relaxes for a moment, and he allows himself a barely perceptible smile that says, Maybe there’s hope for me yet.
Maybe so, but achieving acceptance by the literary crowd won’t be easy. For a century, a great wall has cordoned off the landscape of contemporary English-language fiction into two distinct countries. On one side of the wall is the rarefied province of literature, distinguished by artful prose, richly drawn characters, thematic complexity, psychological and emotional depth, and, often, an essential indifference to plot. On the other side is the action-packed domain of popular fiction, where literary values are trumped by high drama, fast pacing and, above all, page-turning narrative momentum. In one, character is everything and story almost nothing; in the other, that order of priorities is reversed.
Tall, thick, and guarded by sharpshooting sentries, the wall between these two countries has been largely impregnable. But like all such aging structures, it has crumbled in places, offering footholds to a nervy few who’ve scaled it and run along its ramparts, shaking their fists and dangling their legs on either side. Over the years, the ranks of this insurgency have included Dreiser, John P. Marquand, John O’Hara, Graham Greene, John Steinbeck, Tom Wolfe, John Irving, and Richard Price, as well as select outliers who parachute in from the distant continents of genre fiction: John le Carré (spy novels), P. D. James (murder mysteries) and, most recently and controversially, Stephen King (horror).
It’s the outliers who encounter the greatest resistance. “John le Carré gets almost no credit for how inventive a writer he’s been,” Turow says. “I love le Carré, I love P. D. James, and I love the way Steve King is coming to be seen as a serious writer today—not that he’s done a damn thing differently, but the appreciation for him is growing.” Still, for every critic prepared to let Turow out of the penitentiary of genre—such as Wendy Lesser, the Threepenny Review editor who, reviewing Reversible Errors in the New York Times, urged readers to “dispense with the unnecessary modifiers and just call Scott Turow a novelist”—there are several others who insist on sending him back to the slammer. “Personal Injuries not only evinces little of the insider’s knowledge of legal tactics and courtroom theatrics that imparted such authenticity to his earlier books,” the Times critic Michiko Kakutani wrote, “but it also lacks a fundamental sense of suspense.” (Time magazine disagreed, naming it the best work of fiction of 1999.)
“In terms of his reputation, Scott may have been penalized by his commercial success,” says his friend Jeffrey Toobin, a CNN legal analyst and staff writer for the New Yorker. “He’s an extraordinarily fine writer, and that description doesn’t apply to many people who sell like Scott does. I can’t say I feel sorry for him. But to be accurate and fair, you have to recognize that Scott is as skilled as any highbrow writer. With Kindle County, he’s created a world that’s every bit as real and involving as John Updike’s in the Rabbit novels.”
Jonathan Yardley, the Pulitzer Prize–winning book critic of the Washington Post, agrees. “The worst sin a writer can commit in the eyes of the American literary community—which is extraordinarily snobbish, narcissistic, and out of touch—is to be popular and successful,” he says. “Over the years, I’ve become predisposed toward writers like Scott Turow, whose ability to understand the way we work, the way we lead our quotidian lives, is much stronger than that of writers who are venerated in the schools of creative writing. Turow is probably the best of all these writers, in that he combines the necessary ingredients of popular fiction with a very high degree of writing skill and serious themes. He occupies a territory that manages to have legs in both camps, which is an achievement that should be taken very seriously.”
Another literary pastime is to denigrate novels like Turow’s by dismissing them as entertainment. But what does it say about those who imply that to be entertaining is to fail? “I frequently say in my reviews that such-and-such is a very entertaining book and I can pay it no higher compliment,” Yardley says. “There are levels of entertainment, obviously; I find Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa to be immensely entertaining writers, but one is entertained in a different way by them than one is entertained by John Grisham. Still, art and entertainment—I’m reluctant to draw a line between the two, because the best works of fiction entertain as well as uplift or illuminate the human condition.”
Besides, he says, it’s not only snobbery that keeps some people from acknowledging the value of books like Turow’s. “When you have writers who are looking to sell ten thousand copies looking at writers who sell hundreds of thousands of copies, it’s not just literary condescension at work,” Yardley says. “It’s envy.”
The variety and extremity of dramatic incident in Turow’s books strike many readers and critics, understandably, as his way of fulfilling the conventions of his genre. But just as Turow took for granted the wisdom of “show, don’t tell,” he has also applied that other great mantra of writing programs everywhere: “Write what you know.” What Turow knows is the law and the people who administer it. When he graduated from Harvard Law in 1978—he described his first year there in the memoir One L (Putnam, 1977)—he returned to Chicago as an assistant U.S. attorney, where for eight years he tried cases with a skill and zeal that impressed his colleagues and struck fear into the hearts of opposing counsel throughout the city. But even in the midst of that work, and as disillusioned as he was with the prevailing ethos of literary fiction, Turow was far from done with writing.
“When One L came out, I knew he was the real deal as a writer, but I used to make fun of him for writing on the train when we were going downtown,” says Chicago attorney Julian Solotorovsky, who has known Turow for more than thirty years and tried several cases at Turow’s side when they were both young federal prosecutors. “When he was at Stanford, I don’t think Scott studied to write legal thrillers. He studied to write literature. I think what he did was, he became a top-notch trial lawyer, and he saw the opportunity to combine the two. In those days he had a lot going on at once, but he was a driven guy, a hard worker, and he found the time and got it done. And the night he signed the contract for Presumed Innocent, he called me up and gave me all kinds of you-know-what. I had it coming.”
And, as Solotorovsky has reason to know better than most, art has often imitated life in Turow’s novels. Their plots may have struck some critics as overheated genre cliché, but in a real sense, Turow didn’t make this stuff up; in many instances, he lived it. The bribery sting that ensnares several judges for sale in Personal Injuries bears striking resemblances to Operation Greylord, a federal probe into judicial corruption in the mid-1980s, one of whose most celebrated trials was prosecuted by Turow and Solotorovsky. And the death-penalty appeal at the core of Reversible Errors shares a number of characteristics with the real-life case of Alejandro Hernandez, who spent twelve years in the state penitentiary for a murder.
“For years I’d go to court and, like everyone else, I couldn’t get up out of my fucking seat, just because there was a witness on the stand, and I realized that what was gluing people to the seats was the subject itself: crime,” Turow says. “Criminality is one of the great expressions of human imagination. It carries with it the inherent fascination of, ‘How did the criminal get both the courage and the imagination to go beyond the boundaries that I have observed, sometimes with regret?’ It’s so transgressive.”
In Innocent, Turow returns to his most enigmatic and yet most personal character, Rusty Sabich. As readers of Presumed Innocent will recall, Rusty, a Kindle County prosecutor, was tried for the murder of one of his colleagues, Carolyn Polhemus, with whom he was having an extramarital (and obsessive) affair. In Innocent, history repeats itself when Rusty, now chief judge of the state appellate court, has a second affair with a young aide and subsequently finds himself in serious trouble once again. This time he’s accused of murdering his brilliant but mentally unstable wife, Barbara. His defense attorney is again Sandy Stern, and the prosecutor is Tommy Molto, who assisted in Rusty’s first murder trial and now, after marrying and becoming a father late in life, has developed into a considerably more multifaceted and sympathetic figure.
Turow had always resisted writing a sequel to Presumed Innocent, but changed his mind when a story idea he’d scrawled on a sticky note years ago—“a man is sitting on a bed in which the body of the woman lies”—kept haunting him. Who was the woman? How did she get there? “It didn’t take me long to figure out that it was Barbara, and that this was what I had in mind for Rusty Sabich,” Turow says. “But did Rusty actually stay married to this woman? How was that possible? And I realized that Rusty isn’t the first person to stay in a bad marriage.”
This is a pained reference to Turow’s own nearly forty-year marriage to his wife, Annette, which he ended in early 2008, around the same time Rusty, in the developing manuscript, was contemplating a divorce from Barbara. “Rusty’s marriage and my marriage came to an end at about the same time—although in a much different way, of course,” Turow says with a grim smile. “You look back and try to understand why this crap is percolating in the book, and you have no idea at the time. But people do lead their lives this way—they keep making the same mistakes. How can Rusty be doing this again? How can he make the same mistake that almost ruined his life? And the answer is that what lay between then and now was not really worthy of being called life. I think in the end it’s about his unwillingness to accept change. In Presumed Innocent he says repeatedly, ‘I want the life I had before.’ That’s Rusty’s Shakespearean flaw. He wanted the life he had before, and therefore he will make the same mistakes. Out of respect for my kids and my ex-wife, I’m not going to talk about my own divorce, but I will say that my own fear of change had been allayed by that experience. For me, my divorce was a good thing. And it made me approach my publishing relationships with the sense that I had really reinvigorated my life.”
That, in turn, is a reference to Turow’s widely reported decision last year to leave his longtime publisher-editor, FSG’s Jonathan Galassi, for Grand Central, which had held the rights to his backlist for years. “This was just all publishing business,” Turow says now. “Both FSG and Grand Central had let me know for a long time that it was not a good idea to have one house do the hardcover and another do the paperbacks; if one house got two bites at the apple, it would maximize the value of the property. I had not a scintilla of dissatisfaction with Jonathan, but I would be lying if I had to say that I think Farrar, Straus could put a book on the market with the same muscularity that Grand Central can. So I made the change, and now we’ll just have to see what happens.”
Something has to happen. In Turow’s life and work, it always does.
Kevin Nance is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
