Volume 34, Number 18 · November 19, 1987
Grace Street Blues
By Robert Towers
Presumed Innocent
by Scott Turow
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 431 pp., $18.95
Scott Turow's first novel has been first on the best-seller list of The New York Times for many weeks. It has been widely and, for the most part, favorably reviewed, and one must assume that its readers include a considerable number with literary tastes who do not automatically buy every popular novel that becomes a big best seller. Yet Presumed Innocent does not easily fit any preconceived notion of the suspense novel, literary or not. It begins slowly and evokes little sense of danger; though some of its details are shocking or revolting, it is not the sort of book to make the flesh crawl or the pulse rate quicken. Nor is it nearly as arresting in its characterization or as memorable for its stylistic atmospheric effects as the early spy novels of Le Carré or the detective fiction of Chandler and Hammett; in fact, Presumed Innocent near its conclusion commits an act of literary bad faith that any serious writer of such fiction would scorn. For an explanation of the novel's undoubted appeal, we must turn, I think, to two contemporary phenomena: the legalistic preoccupations of our litigious age and the assumption, held most often by people who do not live in big cities, of not only limitless criminal depravity among the 'ethnic' denizens there but also nearly universal corruption among urban politicians and enforcers of law and order.
Review, 1882 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |