Burden of Success

By Paul Gray

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury.

You have heard the charges against my client. The prosecution argues that with malice aforethought he wrote a novel, Presumed Innocent, with the intent of willfully endangering the sleep habits and on-the-job efficiency of millions of innocent readers. Furthermore, it has been claimed that my client is remorseless. The government asserts that his new novel, The Burden of Proof, contains a plot even more fiendishly complicated and irresistible than its predecessor. The prosecution would have you believe that said novel, Exhibit B, constitutes an imminent threat to the public well-being and to the gross national product.

This defense might as well rest; the prosecution has a watertight case. In fact, the imaginary charges against Scott Frederic Turow, 41, may not go far enough. They ignore, for example, the $20 million film version of Presumed Innocent, directed by Alan Pakula and starring Harrison Ford, which will be released this summer and will probably lure every Turow fan who is not still hiding from job and loved ones while reading The Burden of Proof.

And surely there must be a potential class action on behalf of writers, charging Turow with monopolistic practices over the pool of money available for new books. Presumed Innocent racked up several records. Farrar, Straus & Giroux paid Turow $200,000, the most the publisher had ever advanced for a first novel. A paperback sale of $3 million followed, another first-novel first. Then came a million dollars more from Hollywood, and royalties from the 18 foreign-language editions of the novel are still rolling in. Neither Turow nor FS&G will disclose the financial arrangements surrounding The Burden of Proof; what is known is that the author wanted to stay with his original publisher, and his publisher was eager to oblige. But the new novel has already attracted more than $3.2 million for the paperback rights alone. What scribbling starveling, faced with debts and rejection slips -- and knowing that Turow is in addition a handsomely paid lawyer -- could resist the impulse to sue?

But making a federal case out of Turow's success may not be the best way to understand it or the man behind it. He is indisputably a successful Chicago attorney, with a billable rate of $220 an hour, dedicated to the system that rewards him. On the other hand, he has made his mark as an author by dramatizing the limits of legalisms. Both Presumed Innocent and The Burden of Proof weave and coil intricately around the same point: without the law, civilized life is impossible; with the law, civilized life is only nearly impossible.

At the heart of Presumed Innocent is a murder trial, its intricate arabesques portrayed in breathtaking detail, in which the defendant is almost -- almost -- certainly not the guilty party. The Burden of Proof offers a hero, Alejandro ("Sandy") Stern, the brilliant attorney who defended the accused narrator of Presumed Innocent, who must reconcile his responsibilities to his profession with those to his family. As the novel makes clear, Sandy cannot do both.

So how does Scott do both? How can he seek justice for those who pay for his services and continue to turn out best-selling fiction about the frailties of the law? Turow does not see the question as especially difficult: "In functional terms, the law practice always comes first. When my clients call, I can interrupt my writing."

He says this in his 77th-floor office in the world's tallest building, Chicago's Sears Tower, where he is a partner in the 300-awyer firm of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal. This well-appointed, bustling termitarium does not seem the natural habitat of a writer, but Turow blends in easily. He carries a suitably stuffed and scuffed briefcase; he wears dark suits and serious, lace-up lawyer shoes. (Occasionally some modest stripes on his white shirts will betray a whiff of bohemian raffishness.) His accent in no way distinguishes his speech from that heard in the hallways or elevators; he flattens his vowels and comes down hard on his rs, in the approved Midwestern manner, and tends to drop the final g from words like coming.

"I love the law. I always will," he says, seated behind his desk and facing a window with a northward view that embraces many of the landscapes of his life. On a clear day he can see Winnetka, where his parents moved when he was a teenager; closer at hand is the north Chicago neighborhood where he was born. Somewhere in between is his present house, where he lives with his wife Annette and their three children: Rachel, 10, Gabriel, 7, and Eve, 3. "I do regard the law as a noble calling," he elaborates. "But I can't shake the notion that the law is coming ((comin')) up short in its inability to deal with intimate human situations."

This impression is hardly original; jails are full of people convinced that the legal system has misunderstood them. What sets Turow's opinion apart from run-of-the-mill sour grapes is what he has made of it: serious fictional portraits of the present moment, when moral authority is collapsing and the law has become, for better and worse, the sole surviving arena for definitions of acceptable behavior. Disputes that once might have been resolved by fisticuffs or a few intense minutes in the confessional or private negotiations between squabbling clans now tend to wind up as lawsuits. The old ways form a staple of conventional novels; the newer courtroom focus calls for a specialist. By accident and design, Turow has trained himself to write both these narratives at once. He is the Bard of the Litigious Age, an expert witness on the technicalities of the current stampede to litigation and on the ethical and emotional conundrums that accompany it.

If Turow were simply a well-to-do attorney who dabbled in literature, he would almost certainly be hovering still in the ranks of the unheralded and unsung. He regards himself as an unlikely candidate for the rewards he has received: "I don't think anybody betting would have bet on me. I certainly wouldn't have." This is not simply modesty but the recognition that his progress came by way of a number of steps that made no particular sense when he took them. There is a circular irony to Turow's triumph: he finally became what he had always wanted to be -- a successful novelist -- by admitting failure and taking up a profession. The renunciation of his dream, and a lot of hard work along the way, eventually helped the dream come true.

The son of a gynecologist on Chicago's North Shore, Turow inherited ambition early: "I grew up with a very successful father, whose success I knew I'd be expected to emulate." His early years were spent in what he describes as "a nouveau-riche Jewish ghetto" filled with returned World War II veterans eager to get ahead; he recalls the "sense of identity" he got from that ethnic community and the loss he felt when, at age 13, his parents moved further north to the wealthy and Waspish suburb of Winnetka.

There he encountered what he remembers as "a quiet current of anti- Semitism" for the first time, another goad for him to excel. At New Trier high school, he began writing for the school newspaper and quickly determined that he had found his life's work -- one that promised glory at least equal to his father's, and on his own terms. "I told my parents," he says, "that I had abandoned their lifelong ambition for me to be a doctor. I was going to be a writer."

They were neither amused nor encouraging. "My mother wanted to protect me from the fabled anguish of the literary life. She said I could be a doctor and write on the side, like Chekhov and William Carlos Williams." No sale. At Amherst College in the hubbub of the counterculture '60s, Turow became more rebellious still. During his freshman year, he and 22 other students marched against Army recruiters on campus; all promptly lost their student draft deferments. Turow eventually received a 1-Y permanent deferment because of a chronic anemic condition.

On the academic front, Turow was a dedicated free spirit. "I wasn't a great student," he says. "I was nominally an English major. I was trying to figure out how to become a novelist. I wrote a lot, and I read a lot." He recalls "drinking in" Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet and being "overwhelmed by" Robert Stone's first novel, A Hall of Mirrors. He also fell under the influence of a visiting teacher, the short-story writer Tillie Olsen. "She took me seriously as a writer, and I'm enormously grateful."

While at Amherst, Turow had two stories accepted by the Transatlantic Review ; also, during a Christmas break back home, he had a blind date with Annette Weisberg, an art major at the University of Illinois and a near neighbor whom he had never met before. With graduation approaching, he was offered a fellowship to study creative writing at Stanford. "What was the alternative? A job!" So to the dismay of four parents, he and Annette set out for California.

Among other lessons, his four years at Stanford taught Turow the charms of the bourgeois life he thought he had rejected. "True student poverty," with its balancing of stipends, food stamps and unemployment benefits, he found difficult to take. "The only fight about money that Annette and I ever had was over a $6 pot she bought at an art auction." In addition, California life-styles in the early 1970s made Turow realize that he was more conventional than he had thought. "It was unbelievable," he remembers. "There was incessant drinking and substance abuse, and marriages were falling apart all over the place. Annette and I were newly married ((they made their union official in April 1971)), and we decided to stay married. In that sense, California was too crazy for us."

Some of Turow's irritability stemmed from the recognition that his writing was going nowhere. In spite of his gratitude to helpful professors -- part of his earnings from Presumed Innocent went to endow a fellowship at Stanford -- he felt stymied by "academic values about literature, the sense that books could be appreciated only by a priesthood. I thought that a great novel could be read as well by a bus driver as by an English professor. It was not a popular view." He was also convinced that no great novels would be written by him. "It finally dawned on me that I was not James Joyce. I wanted to be a genius, but I wasn't one."

The novel he had been struggling to complete for his master's degree, titled The Way Things Are, involved, among other complications, a rent strike. "I realized that I knew nothing about the legal complexities of such an act," he says. "I also noticed that most of my friends, the people I had come to feel closest to at Stanford, were lawyers." As a lark, Turow decided to take the Law School Admission Test; he came back from the exam convinced he had made a fool of himself. In fact, he scored well enough to gain admission to Harvard and Yale law schools. He submitted The Way Things Are to some publishers and, as he expected, received rejections. "Even if that novel had been published, I would have gone to law school." He chose Harvard, chiefly because the Boston-Cambridge area offered numerous job opportunities for Annette to teach art and support him.

The story could easily have ended here, and in a not very original way: another aspiring artist surrenders to the exigencies of the real world. But Turow's arrival at Harvard came with one of those little anomalies that inspire curious readers to turn the page. While explaining to his agent his decision to abandon literature, Turow had mentioned the possibility of someone's doing a nonfiction book about the experiences of first-year law students. He received a $4,000 contract to do just that. So he went to Harvard not only to study law but also, as he says, "to make new friends and to write about them."

After his grueling first nine months, Turow spent 14 equally grueling weeks in the summer turning his diaries into narrative form. One L was published just before his final year at Harvard. Some of his professors and classmates did not like the book -- and particularly their thinly disguised appearances in it -- but most reviewers were ecstatic. One L went on to sell some 40,000 copies in hardback and to become an underground, pass-along classic among law students. Turow confesses himself thrilled by "my first taste of literary success," but he was not swayed from the new path he had chosen. "I gave no thought," he says, with heavy emphasis, "to not practicing law."

Harvard had changed him. "I learned a lot about myself in law school," he says. "I finally got over the '60s. I discovered that raging inside of me was a competitive, acquisitive little Jewish boy from Chicago." When an offer came to join the U.S. attorney's staff in Chicago, he and Annette jumped at it. "I thought it was the best job imaginable, that it had the power to help shape the community." The return to their native city marked an important rite of passage for the Turows, a sense that the onetime prodigal children had returned and were prepared to become adults. "I had been taught that all writers have to find their roots," Turow says. "Well, I found mine in the upper-middle class."

At that point he was not really a writer anymore but a full-time lawyer. The eight years he spent as a deputy U.S. prosecutor included Operation Greylord, a widespread crackdown and sting operation that nabbed corrupt judges and other scoundrels in the Illinois legal system. Turow successfully prosecuted, among others, a state attorney general and a circuit-court judge.

This was heady stuff for a young attorney, but Turow had something else on his mind as well. On his half-hour train commutes from his suburban bungalow, he had begun a novel, jotting scenes in a spiral notebook. Given these conditions, the book lurched along fitfully, and Turow often felt that Presumed Innocent would never be finished. "Eventually Annette told me to quit my job and get that book out of my system." He took the late summer of 1986 off and submitted a manuscript two weeks before reporting for work at his new firm. "I hoped that I had crossed the great divide between popular and serious fiction, but at times I thought I'd simply fallen into it."

The success of Presumed Innocent initially overwhelmed him. "I'm not a weeper, but a few weeks after the novel came out, I woke up early one morning and cried uncontrollably for about an hour. The realization that I'd finally done what I'd wanted to do for so long just floored me. It was both immensely satisfying and a little scary."

The financial windfall has had almost no visible impact on him. He and Annette still live in the house they bought five years ago, a four-bedroom affair on a corner lot on a quiet street. "I don't believe in living like a raja," he says. "I didn't want to buy a big house on the lake and then have people point at it." And neither he nor Annette saw any reason to tamper with a good thing. "After our early struggle to establish our values, we really felt we'd found our way. Annette's career as a painter had begun, our children had been born, we'd formed a family. Why change?" One small alteration. He wrote Presumed Innocent in the basement; now he has a second-floor study.

He is mildly apprehensive about the reception that will greet The Burden of Proof. He expects some reviewers to cudgel him with the success of Presumed Innocent and anticipates complaints that the new novel does not repeat the formula of the old. "But that was intentional," he says. "I was wildly afraid of self-imitation when I began the second book. And I'm proud of The Burden of Proof, particularly the portrait of Sandy Stern and his complicated involvements in family life."

Turow's life at the moment is hectic. As a lawyer, he is representing clients in what he delicately describes as "three grand-jury matters" that will occupy some of his attention as he sets off on a coast-to-coast publicity tour for his new novel. Why not simply stay at home and take care of business? "Since I've taken money for this project, I owe all the people who have an investment in it."

Can this guy be for real? Writers, especially the rich and famous ones, are not supposed to be self-effacing and cooperative, nor to heap praise and gratitude on their editors and publishers. Turow regularly does: "Jonathan Galassi ((editor in chief at Farrar, Straus & Giroux)) made recommendations that substantially improved both Presumed Innocent and The Burden of Proof. After the way I've been treated by my publisher, I'd be a schmuck to think about going somewhere else." That is a distinct departure in an age when publishing-world loyalties have been swept away by bidding wars and the lure of big advances.

Yet Turow's straight-arrow character may explain, better than anything else, why his books have struck a responsive public chord. His plots and characters revolve around a nexus of old-fashioned values: honesty, loyalty, trust. When these values are violated -- sometimes salaciously, always entertainingly -- lawyers and the legal system rush in to try to set things right again. But the central quest in Turow's fiction is not for favorable verdicts but for the redemption of souls, the healing of society. Best sellers seldom get more serious than that.