THE LAWS OF OUR FATHERS
Scott Turow
Farrar Straus Giroux
Publication Date: October 18, 1996
Price: $26.95
Pages: 532


Scott Turow is not like your normal mystery writer: he is both better, and more. If you could describe authors like Dashiel Hammett and Walter Mosely as being from the “hardboiled” school of mystery writing, then Turow would be from the “omelet” academy. I don’t say this disparagingly. Turow’s writing flows in many directions and fills all cracks in its way, and sometimes you get the impression that he has concocted some grand mystery just to have an excuse to talk about the social and human problems that are really his greatest interest.

“The Laws Of Our Fathers” is another fine effort from a fine writer.

I didn’t think so at first. It wasn’t until about page 200 that I began to get in a groove with the characters in “Fathers” and--not coincidentally--began to like the book. That’s fine with me...I’ve learned to be patient with my pleasures...but I’m not so sure it will sit well with the “Feed Me, Seymour” instant-gratification American reading public. Especially when the book is supposed to be a grab-you-by-your-throat courtroom thriller, as we have become used to Mr. Turow providing us with. It would be shame, though, if people put “Fathers” down prematurely. They will be missing something special.

My exposure to Scott Turow’s work came in a roundabout way: I saw the Harrison Ford-starring movie made from his first novel, “Presumed Innocent.” The plot was masterful and textbook mystery: I did not suspect the real murderer until the last moments of the film and then, thinking back, the identity seemed so obvious that I felt monumentally dumb for not having figured it out from the beginning. So I read the book, and got a pleasant surprise. Turow salts clues and red herrings so well in “Presumed Innocent” that even knowing who-done-it from the very start, I found myself shocked and surprised all over again when the killer was finally identified.

A tough, tough first act to follow.

Turow tries a similar tack in “The Laws Of Our Fathers,” his fourth book. In the opening pages a well-to-do white woman is killed in a drive-by shooting, prompting questions as to why she was standing on a drug-dealer corner in an African-American neighborhood in the early morning hours. None of the usual answers fit. The murder case brings about the reunion of several people who had lived together and worked in the radical anti-war movement in the late 60’s: the victim herself, her son (who is the accused murderer), her husband (now a state senator), the trial judge, the defense attorney, and a newspaper columnist writing pieces about the trial.

There are some discordant notes, which was why it took me so long to warm up to the book.

First, unlike a trial lawyer, Turow tends not to set a good foundation for his characters. He generally gives a quick physical description, some sketchy background, and then his characters sets everybody off and running. Under these circumstances it’s hard to get a handle on the folks he wants us to care about, and for a while, I didn’t. Keep a box of paper clips or some extra bookmarks handy, for marking places where you’ll need to backtrack and re-read for clarification.

Second, an enormous part of the book involves the African-American hip-hop, drug dealing culture, which Turow doesn’t always get quite right. The portrayal of African-Americans by non African-American writers is a pet peeve of mine; somehow, African-Americans seem so familiar (from videos, perhaps, or movies) that our speech patterns and mannerisms can be easily recreated without a lot of thought. To his enormous credit, Turow does not do this. He has obviously given much time studying hip-hop grammar and idiom, and tries just as hard to get inside the heads of his drug-dealing characters as he does with everybody else. If he does not always get it right, it is not for lack of respect, or for want of trying. As a result, his portrayals of the gang leader Hardcore and his teenage secretary-runner, Bug, are memorable: they live on after the book is closed. Even the judge is allowed to see them as human:

“At intervals, I’ve had some instinct to curb Hardcore’s language,” [the judge notes to herself] “This is still a courtroom, to which the public is invited. But he is too natural, too forceful a storyteller in his own mode to bear much interruption. Even Hobie [the defense attorney], who until this moment has had the star turn here, seems to have no urge to slow him down. Core, quite evidently, is enjoying himself. Over the months I’ve been sitting in Criminal, I’ve been struck by how often a simple, childish desire for attention accounts for the presence of many of these young people. Most of these kids grow up feeling utterly disregarded--by fathers who departed, by mothers who are overwhelmed, by teachers with unmanageable classrooms, by a world in which they learn, from the TV set and the rap of the street, they do not count for much. Crime gathers for them, if only momentarily, an impressive audience: the judge who sentences, the lawyer who visits, the cops who hunt them--even the victims who, for an endless moment on the street, could not discount them.”

But eventually all of the major characters in the novel achieve such depth and refuse to be discounted, even the villains. Turow gives everybody their say and leaves the reader, as jury, to pass our own judgment.

“The Laws Of Our Fathers” is less a mystery, more a social study of lost love and the unrecapturable youth of aging radicals, of what it means to be the child of a Holocaust survivor, of what it means to be the child of an American Communist union activist, of what it means to come to terms with the angst of one’s True Believing parents...as such, it is an excellent commentary on an uneasy and unsure America of the 90’s. And Scott Turow, therefore, is more than a mystery writer. But he writes a damn good mystery, too, so we are left with the best of a lot of worlds.