Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 1, 1990 TAG: 9007040112
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by GEOFF SEAMANS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Scott Turow, author of the best-selling "Presumed Innocent," has come up with another blockbuster in "The Burden of Proof."
Like "Presumed Innocent," Turow's first novel, "Burden" is an intricately plotted (almost, but not quite, too much so) story that begins with the discovery of a corpse, displays a carefully accurate ear for dialogue - and, above all, is a voyage of discovery for the lawyer who is its central character.
But "Burden" is no echo of "Presumed Innocent" with only the names changed to protect the guilty. It is not a murder but the suicide of his wife, Clara, that sends off Alejandro "Sandy" Stern, last seen as Rusty Stabich's defense lawyer in "Presumed Innocent," on his voyage of discovery. It is not the sea of big-city municipal politics, but family politics (in a broad sense of the word), that supplies the backdrop. And the discoveries sought by Stern are as much about himself as about anything or anyone else.
Washington Post reviewer Jonathan Yardley observed that Turow's work is a rare combination, both serious and popular. Turow's seriousness of purpose acquits the novel of the the charge of overripe plotting, of descending into soap opera. That purpose, or so it seems to me, is to examine the ways in which Americans of the late 20th century try to bring order to their internal lives amid the chaos of external reality.
This theme seems stronger in "Burden" than it was in "Presumed Innocent." Stern, whose Jewish family had immigrated to the United States from Argentina when he was a child, has tried to order his life by self-consciously using American ways of thinking and behaving for his pattern. But a rift between what his life is, and what he would like it to be, is inevitable: Even as an adult, for example, he avoids the idiom of American slang for fear he won't get it quite right. Clara's suicide, and the questions she asks in death, force Stern to confront a deeper version of the truth.
Turow is a lawyer; his central characters are lawyers (and, for that matter, the law) presumably because it's a milieu with which he is intimately familiar. But the choice also is an obvious one for anyone writing about contemporary American society, where the law has replaced religion as moral governor.
Figuring a writer, after only two novels, for future inclusion in the so-called canon of literature is like figuring a baseball player for the Hall of Fame after only two outstanding seasons. Besides, Turow bears the taint of popular readability - a flaw that can be overlooked in, say, Dickens, but a grievous sin in the eyes of today's canoneers.
by CNB