Modern society’s complexity makes people feel maddeningly dependent on others for elemental social needs. Society’s density has them irritably jostling one another’ throwing elbows and litigation for social space. As traditional sources of social norms–families. schools, churches weaken, law seeps into the vacuum. As laws, regulations, rules, contracts, mediations, arbitrations and negotiations multiply, so do lawyers. Antipathy toward lawyers expresses resentment of the need to rely on people without whose arcane skills (and vocabularies) we frequently cannot function. Doctors, too, are like this but most patients still feel that doctors generally are on their side and are providing something they need, whereas lawyers seem increasingly parisitic.
Disdain for Congress is related to Congress’s reputation as a nest of lawyers displaying their profession’s skill at making work for itself Modern government, indiscriminately meddlesome, invites indeed incites-people to hire lawyers to bend public power for private advantage. Potential losers from this process defensively hire countervailing lawyers.
The Cold War’s end has been hell for spy novelists, but lawyer novels satisfy an unslaked thirst for tales of conspiracies and shadiness. Many Americans believe that what is apparent about society is a mere facade: they want to see society’s hidden gears and pulleys, and the people–mostly lawyers who work them. “To me,” says the comedian Seinfeld, “a lawyer is basically the person that knows the rules of the country. We’re all throwing the dice, playing the game. moving our pieces around the board, but if there is a problem the lawyer is the only person who has read the inside of the top of the box.” Many Americans suspect that lawyers wrote, the inside of the top of the box for their benefit.
In “The Firm” a lawyer says of tax law, “It’s a game. We teach the rich how to play it so they can stay rich and the IRS keeps changing the rules so we can keep getting rich teaching them.” A flat and simple tax is the nightmare of the parasite lawyer-lobbyist class, which today is purring contentedly about the new administration. And contemporary liberalism, which in the name of has made the status of “victim” lucrative, multiplies…rights" and prompts belief in a “right” to be compensated. by someone, for all of life’s many misfortunes or disappointments.
Turow thinks his novels have found a large readership because “the law remains our one universally recognized repository of values.” About this he is, I think, exactly wrong. People may once have believed that, but his novels are superb in part because, truthfully and without cynicism, they subvert that soothing belief. Perhaps the emotional equilibrium of some people is served by faith that law has routinized justice. Some people, having rejected traditional faiths in transcendent sources of salvation, seek from the lush growth of laws the comforting illusion of a moral economy in the world, guaranteeing that good is rewarded and evil is punished. It is not mere coincidence that the twilight of the gods has brought the dawn of the age of lawyers. They are custodians of the arrangements that are supposed to keep chaos in check. Law purports to put a structure of order. even reason, into life.
But for Turow’s fictional lawyers, file often is the experience of moral vertigo, and the law is a labyrinth of ambiguities. As one of his most complex and sympathetic characters. Alejandro (Sandy) Stern, says, “The toil of man in society! The rushing about, the telephone calls, the small breaks of light in the tangle of egos and rules.” Turow’s demystifying novels convey how many and wide ire the fissures through which proof, truth and justice can leak away in trials and other legal processes. Stich processes often are less akin to the tidiness of engineering than to the gropings of premodern medicine. A Turow character says:
“Come into the teeming city, with so many souls screaming, I want, I need, where most social planning amounts to figuring out how to keep them all at bay come and try to imagine the ways that vast unruly community can be kept in touch with the deeper aspirations of’ humankind for the overall improvement of the species, the good of’ the many and the rights of the few. That I always figured was the task of the law, and it makes high-energy physics look like a game show.”
Turow’s novels are not mere entertainment. They transcend their genre: they are literature that will last. American literature, from Cooper in his forests to Melville on the oceans to Twain on the river, is rich with regrets about society pressing in on the individual. But we are still much in need of a literature that looks contemporary society in [he face, sees it steadily and sees it whole, and does not despair about the dignity of the individual, the efficacy of choice, or the sphere of freedom. Turow’s novels of the law convey a sense of society’s weight and thickness. But they also suggest that life is lived largely in the gaps in the fabric of the law that is stretched thinly over the tumultuousness of humanity.
The cadences of Turow’s prose, is well as the substance, of his stories are as urban as the sound of a jazz saxophone, at 2 a.m. He has been admiringly compared to Theodore Dreiser, another novelist fascinated by Chicago’s raw energy. If Chicagoan Turow’s Kindle County isn’t Cook County, Illinois, it is close enough. It is acquiring a reality as a convincing moral landscape comparable to that of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County.
