Volume 37, Number 13 · August 16, 1990
Inconclusive Evidence
By Robert Towers
The Burden of Proof
by Scott Turow
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 515 pp., $22.95
The Music Room
by Dennis McFarland
Houghton Mifflin, 275 pp., $19.95
In a Father's Place
by Christopher Tilghman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 214 pp., $18.95
Scott Turow's first novel, Presumed Innocent, appeared three years ago, remained on the Times best-seller list for fifty-four weeks, and has just been made into a movie. For much of its length it is an interesting, competently written work of detective and courtroom fiction, with a wider social range than is usual, providing entertaining observations on arcane legal matters that Turow, himself a practicing lawyer, presents with commendable clarity. The novel's climax is a suspenseful trial scene in which the defense is brilliantly conducted by an Argentinian-Jewish lawyer named Alejandro Stern. Unfortunately, Turow seriously undermined whatever literary claims his book might have had by what I consider an act of novelistic bad faith: the revelation near the novel's end of crucial information that the first-person narrator has until then concealed from the reader. This trick makes psychological nonsense of the narrator's carefully rendered thoughts and intimate feelings, which have been laid out from the start.
Review, 3266 words
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