Interview with Scott Turow

The Laws of Our Fathers

By Scott Turow
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26.95

ISBN 0374184232

Also available on audio from
Simon & Schuster Audio, $25

Audio ISBN 0671574329

When characters slip from the confines of plot:
A talk with Scott Turow

Interview by Alden Mudge

"Just because it's a mystery, it doesn't have to be mindless," Scott Turow says near the end of our phone conversation about his new novel, The Laws of Our Fathers. Turow, who is unexpectedly down to earth and is embarrassed by my compliments for the new book, is actually praising the work of another novelist, the mystery writer Ruth Rendell. But, as readers of such absorbing and psychologically rich legal thrillers as Presumed Innocent and The Burden of Proof will quickly recognize, Turow's remark aptly captures one of the most satisfying qualities of his own fiction -- the broad but unobtrusive intelligence that informs the movements of his characters and their actions.

That intelligence is at work again in The Laws of Our Fathers, which draws on a more vibrant palette of characters and plot than any of Turow's books to date. The action begins with the perplexing murder of the former wife of a state senator in a gang-controlled housing project (was this an ambush gone awry? a carefully hatched plan in which the victim's hapless son was an unwitting accomplice to a scheming former husband?). It ends up as a politically explosive case in the courtroom of Judge Sonia "Sonny" Klonsky, who was a major character in Turow's previous novel, The Burden of Proof, and appears here as a central figure in a volatile mix of personalities who share a common past. The case also draws to the courtroom Sonny's long-ago boyfriend, Seth Weissman, now a newspaper columnist, wayward husband, and grieving father; his boyhood friend, Hobie Tuttle, now a brilliant and angry defense attorney; and a host of others who were connected to each other during the era of Vietnam protests. The dust of the past stirs, and the tumult of the revolutionary 1960s reverberates through the present-day courtroom.

"For people like me," Turow says, "people of a certain privilege, the sixties were extremely important in shaping our sense of humanity. But it wasn't all a bed of roses. The gang-plagued housing projects are another legacy of this era." Those projects were a shock to Turow when he visited them in 1989 while doing pro bono legal work and at a time when the 1960s part of the novel, the "back story" as he calls it, was gestating. "I did not realize how bad, how desperately bad the plight of the black urban poor had become," he says with audible emotion. "I was incredibly shaken during those visits."

According to Turow, he had already decided that he couldn't write about the 1960s without writing something about race. But the visits to the projects seem to have offered an important link between The Laws of Our Fathers' "back story" and the present-day story of murder, mercy, and revenge. One result is that the career of the emotionally complex and incredibly canny black defense attorney, Hobie Tuttle, follows an almost emblematic path, from a privileged middle class childhood and youth, to flirtation with radicals in the Black Power movement and estrangement from his friend Seth during the 1960s, and on to an edgy kind of success as a defense lawyer in the present.

"Hobie's character is one of my favorites," Turow says. "In each of my books a character begins to take over. In The Burden of Proof it was Sonny Klonsky. I wrote almost a third of the book in her voice until my editor reined me in. In this book it was Hobie Tuttle. He was originally just part of the mechanics of the novel, but he took over. I love his character. Hobie Tuttle is one clever dude."

In fact, one of the most dramatic and satisfying courtroom scenes in the book is the one in which Tuttle triumphantly matches wits with another powerfully drawn, intelligent black character, Ordell "Hardcore" Trent, a drug pusher, leader of the Black Saints Disciples gang, and a vital witness for the prosecution's case. Hardcore, as Turow says, "is not a nice guy." But Hardcore, a secondary figure in the novel, is also no two-dimensional monster, and Turow took considerable risks with language to lend the portrait energy and authenticity. "I violated a fairly well-established taboo against writing in dialect," he says. Making it work "became quite a balancing act. But I worked hard, and I think I got it right."

In a novel as full of twists and turns as this one, the language of the mean streets is not the only thing Turow got right -- nor the only risk he took. He manages to capture, for example, the blend of the weird and the wacky that characterized much of the 1960s -- as in the story of how Seth Weissman avoided the draft. According to Turow, who relates the story with obvious glee, he was still hesitant about this particular plot development when he went to visit the writer Frederick Busch at Colgate in New York state. "I read a little bit from the book, and he asked me what happened next. When I told him Seth engineers his own kidnapping, I could see that gleam that comes into another novelist's eye when heÕs thinking 'Oh, goddamit, I wish I'd thought of that.' That's when I decided the idea had possibilities."

Other novels by Scott Turow:
Burden of Proof

Presumed Innocent

Pleading Guilty
(Warner Books, $6.99 each)

As for risks, Turow has always pressed hard on the conventions of the legal thriller. He tells me that craft is an "intuition of how you work within the conventions and how you depart from them," and adds, "there's a certain point as a writer when you let go."

And that's the key. In The Laws of Our Fathers, Turow seems to have reached a certain point and let go. The truth is, the book is only partly about the courtroom drama whose ins and outs Turow and I have been discussing for almost an hour. There comes a point, as Turow acknowledges, when "you may no longer care about the answer to the question every legal thriller asks [who is responsible?] as much as you care about the characters." At that point the characters slip from the confines of the plot and the book becomes something grander, a morally and pyschologically shaded exploration of the awesomely powerful emotional ties that bind parents and their children.

"This book felt more organic throughout the writing of it than any of my other books," Turow says as we near the end of our conversation, then adds, "I really don't know what readers are going to make of it."

Well, one reader at least considers it something of a triumph, and gives it an enthusiastic thumbs up.

Alden Mudge is a writer in Oakland, California. He can be reached at alden_mudge@bookpage.com