The Burden of Proof
By Scott Turow
Farrar, Straus Giroux, 515 pages, $22.95
On your way home from the bookstore, lay in a supply of food. Lock your door, turn off the telephone, program the VCR to save your favorite programs, then cancel all social engagements for at least two days: You`re not going to want to go anywhere until you finish this riveting novel.
Scott Turow, the Chicago author and attorney who three years ago delighted both critics and readers with the bestseller ”Presumed Innocent,” has assembled a distinctive cast of characters who play out a drama as inevitable and as universal as that of ”King Lear” or ”Job.” At its center resides a good man, Alejandro ”Sandy” Stern-the clever defense attorney in Turow`s previous book-an Argentine-Jewish immigrant who would seem to have attained everything he could desire: Clara, his lovely, talented wife, three successful and handsome children, wealth, position and professional respect. If Stern has a flaw, it is his arrogant self-ignorance of his real situation, the blindness of Greek tragedy. He sees but he does not see-and therein lies his undoing.
”The Burden of Proof” begins with the shock of Clara`s suicide. Her note-”Can you forgive me?”-reveals nothing, and the only possible clue to her motivation is an unexplained, unpaid bill from a medical lab. The Stern children-Marta, a lawyer like her father, Peter, a physician, and Kate, pregnant and happily married to John, her high school-jock sweetheart-are stunned and confused. On the day of the funeral, Stern`s brother-in-law and biggest client, Dixon, is served with an FBI summons that demands he surrender a truckload of records involving his trading on the Chicago futures market. He professes complete innocence, and Stern takes the case partly out of family loyalty, partly as a diversion from his grief.
Thus are the twin wheels of Turow`s intricate, fascinating plot set in motion. Like an overgrown thicket of thorny weeds, everything tangles with everything else. Stern, pulled forward by a quest for the truth, finds himself in one ethical miasma after another. Even as his interest in sex revives, all confidence in his past is eroded. He is cast adrift and each familiar, cherished belief to which he clings proves dramatically insubstantial.
A remarkable feature of Turow`s work-the one that enables him to transform his legalistic mysteries into real literature without sacrificing an iota of their popular appeal-is his uncanny ability to create memorable supporting characters. ”The Burden of Proof” is full of such people, some of whom appear only once or twice while others are central to the book`s action. He is especially deft with women: Silvia, Stern`s enigmatic sister; Dixon`s chief executive officer, Margy, with a libido that won`t quit (her name is emphatically pronounced with a hard ”g”); Helen, a longtime family friend whose attitudes are never predictable; Fiona, the angry, frustrated next-door neighbor.
Best of all is Sonia ”Sonny” Klonsky, the pregnant 41-year-old assistant district attorney whose job it is to prosecute Dixon and who thus finds herself in an adversarial relationship with Stern, whose ability and style she has long admired.
As is the case with so many of Turow`s complicated people, Sonny Klonsky refuses to be one-dimensional. She is a cancer survivor-like the Amazon warriors of legend she has but one breast-and the wife of a postman-poet, and she finds it impossible to subvert what she believes to what she is professionally compelled to do.
Stern finds himself attracted by her intelligence, her spirit, her fierce allegiance to candor. And no wonder: Sonny Klonsky, for all her confusion and mess, is everything he started out wanting to become.
They share an episode at the center of ”The Burden of Proof” that`s positively lyrical.
Visiting Sonny and her 9-year-old son for an afternoon at her rural cabin-the ostensible purpose is to obtain information about the nature of her evidence against Dixon-Stern finds himself first picking strawberries and then putting the little boy to bed.
There is a touching purity to the day, a quality that lifts it out of the rush of events, that temporarily lowers the protective disguises with which modern urban human beings so often cloak themselves.
For a fleeting moment Stern and Sonny glimpse the kind of poignant, peaceful, familial rapport that`s possible though rarely attained. In contrast to the deceit and lies that have surrounded the unwitting Stern for a quarter- century, this bucolic interlude speaks of a hope for true communication, for kindness, for a well-placed trust in decency.
Of course, that mood cannot be sustained. The external world is inexorable: its questions must be attended to, its procedures must be followed, its convoluted logic must be obeyed.
Stern is ultimately held in the vise of his past mistakes, of his culpable naivete, of the problems he failed to address for too long. The mysteries that somehow link Clara`s death and Dixon`s business double-dealings must be solved, regardless of the consequences.
The rush of history steamrolls the poetic dream. You will turn the pages until dawn to find out how this happens. And you will not be disappointed; it all makes sense.
”The Burden of Proof” may not be a perfect novel-toward the end there`s a single gratuitous coincidence that`s hard to swallow-but it`s thoroughly satisfying and provocative.
At the novel`s heart is that proverbial question: How much is it worth to know the truth? Revelation is a burden. And to forego the self-serving fantasy of happiness is to risk the loss of all consolation except knowledge.
Like Adam in the Garden of Eden, Stern cannot resist the fruit of the forbidden tree. He gains wisdom but forfeits forever the fantasy of paradise on earth. Yet it is that very compulsion, that drive to see, that makes Alejandro ”Sandy” Stern such a sympathetic mensch and gives Scott Turow`s novel its strengh and importance.
