Presumed Innocent, by Scott Turow. An interesting book, more for the author's style and approach than for the story itself. Going into this book I knew nothing about the story. I knew it was a courtroom drama/crime thriller, and that the book had been a big hit, and that they'd made a movie of it at some point in the 90s. However, since I'd never seen the movie, or read anything else by Turow, I was entirely virginal in my entry into this one. Or, to be more appropriate to the metaphor, before its entry into me.
The story/mystery itself is fairly clever, and the writing style was nothing like I'd expected. I enjoyed reading the book, and it kept me occupied during my hour of cardio 3 or 4 nights in a row. It wasn't what I'd expected at all, in terms of the writing style and presentation. That said, I have to conclude that it wasn't successful as a crime thriller, or as the psychology study the author appeared to aspire towards. I'll elaborate on those issues, upon after the scores:
Presumed Innocent, by Scott Turow, 1987
Plot: 4 or 9
Concept: 8
Writing Quality/Flow: 8/4
Characters: 8
Fun Factor: 6
Page Turner: 3
Re-readability: 3 or 9
Overall: 5
I'm sure of my opinion about this book and my reaction to it, but I still had a lot of trouble deciding on the scores. I'm conflicted. That 4/9 on plot is two scores. The 9 is what I'd have given it if I hadn't caught onto the plot twist and had remained entertained and enlightened by Turow's psychologically-probing writing style. (The overall score would have been much higher as well, in that case.) The 4 is my actual score, since I did catch onto the ultimate plot twist very early on, which forced me to slog more than 200 intervening pages of non-thrilling courtroom thriller simply because I wanted to see how the author was going to reveal the shocking truth. (In a very non-shocking, somewhat reader-cheating, almost beside-the-point fashion.) The re-readability scores are the same; I'll never reread a word of it. I only got through it the first time out of curiosity and examination of the writer's craft. However, for a person who didn't guess the plot twist early on and got to page 400 and dropped the book with a gasp of astonishment, I think a reread would be mandatory. You'd be curious to see the clues you'd missed and to study how certain characters behaved throughout the story, once you knew the sordid truth about them.
Here's the basic plot, quoted from Publisher's Weekly blurb on
the Amazon.com book page (where 89 readers who liked the book a lot more than I did have given it an aggregate 4.5/5 score):
...narrator Rusty Sabich, a married prosecuting attorney whose affair with a colleague comes back to haunt him after she is brutally raped and murdered. Sabich's professional and personal lives begin to mingle painfully when he becomes the accused.
The problem is that Rusty is the narrator, and it's immediately clear that either he didn't do it, or is insane and has blocked off the knowledge that he did it. Not that there are signs pointing to that, but the narration of the book is usually deep in Rusty's thoughts, and he couldn't have done it, unless the author was out to recklessly cheat the reader.
Rusty is said to be a very good DA, and a good investigator, but he does a shit job digging into the mystery when he's investigating it, and he does a shittier job defending himself when he's accused of the crime. He's fairly conscientious in following technical details, but he never thinks of the big picture. The hot blonde assistant D.A., with whom Rusty previously had an affair, is found dead in her apt. There are no signs of forced entry or rape, she was killed by a single blow to the head from an unknown weapon, she's tied up in a back-arching bondage type pose, a man's sperm is inside of her vagina, and all the doors and windows have been left unlocked. The initial assumption is that she was raped and murdered, possibly by one of the criminals she put away in the past.
So Rusty investigates fingerprints, has the sperm sample tested (this is before DNA testing, so they can't get any absolute matches), etc. But he never tries to figure out who the dead woman was fucking now (she's banged half the department, and was doing Rusty's boss after she dumped Rusty), who had a motive to kill her, if some third party might have killed her shortly after she had sex with the mystery guest of the evening, etc. It's immediately clear to the reader that it must be a cop or a D.A. or someone else inside, but Rusty never seems to consider that, and that such a killer would know more than the average person about how to cover his tracks.
The plot starts to twist when the glass found in the apartment has Rusty's fingerprints on it, the sperm matches his type (1/10 chance of that, we're told), carpet fibers match his house (and every other house in the area), etc. Lots of circumstantial that points to him, but no smoking gun. So to speak. He's got no real alibi for that night, his wife was out, he was home along with his son, and phone records show a long history of phone calls from his house to the victim's house, including one the night of the murder, which Rusty's sure he didn't make, and thinks the new prosecutor must be faking to try to frame him.
Once accused, Rusty never thinks about any big picture either. He doesn't wonder who else could have killed her, how a glass with his fingerprints got there, how there was sperm with spermacide in the dead woman's vagina when she'd never used protection when he was fucking her, etc. He's just this worrying, whining victim, delving deeply into psychological worries and speculations about the philosophical underpinnings of human behavior.
I felt that Turow (or his editor) consciously let that stuff out, since it would have led the reader to divine the mystery far too soon. But 1) I did anyway, and 2) it made Rusty seem like an idiot and lost him much of my sympathy. Mostly though, it felt like I was being manipulated by an author who hadn't constructed a mystery that was mysterious enough to sustain itself for the length of the book.
The writing style was the biggest surprise, for me. I'd never read any of Turow's stuff before this (and don't intend to actively seek out any more, though I'd read something else by him if it fell into my lap), but I expected him to be an ex-lawyer, and the story to be your typical plot-based pot-boiler. Dan Brown, John Grisham, Michael Crichton style stuff, with two-dimensional cliched character types, minimal character development, lots of courtroom conflict and scheming, and a plot that was entirely event based. I was correct that Turow was an ex-lawyer (a defense attorney and US prosecutor), but the book is more like a courtroom drama written by a grad student doing a double major in psych/phil.
Here's a bit more of the Publisher's Weekly blurb:
Turow draws the reader into a grittily realistic portrait of big city political corruption that climaxes with a dramatic murder trial in which every dark twist of legal statute and human nature is convincingly revealed... Turow's ability to forge the reader's identification with the protagonist, his insightful characterizations of Sabich's legal colleagues, and the overwhelming sense he conveys of being present in the courtroom are his most brilliant and satisfying contributions to what may become a literary crime classic.
I don't agree that this was accomplished, but it was clearly what the author was striving for.
The characters are all static and unchanging, (with the arguable exception of the narrator Rusty) but we get great chunks of the novel, literally pages at a time, delving into every main character's deepest motivations and mental states, their painful childhoods, how they coped with stresses such as the deaths of their parents, what makes them tick today, what their goals and hopes are for the future, etc. It's hugely detailed, and not at all necessary to the story; it's just the author's style and area of interest, and it's not at all what you'd expect in a best-selling legal thriller. Not what I expected, at least.
I found it interesting and inspiring for the first 100 pages or so, then gradually lost interest once the plot stagnated into the doomed farce of the trial, which I didn't really care about since I knew Rusty didn't do it and was almost certain to go free. The question became how he'd get off, and if he'd be willing to solve the crime and push forward the guilty person, who I'm not naming to avoid being spoilery. Once the plot was no longer advancing, and Rusty was seeming so dumb about trying to keep himself out of prison, I lost most of my interest in the deep, detailed character profiles, and never really cared about or feared for Rusty himself.
So it didn't work that well for me, for various reasons. YMMV, of course, which is why I've avoided giving away the twist. Honestly though, that's almost beside the point, since the book isn't meant to be suspenseful or a thriller. It's more like a long series of psychological character studies and philosophical musings, given some shape and structure by the courtroom thriller format. It read like it was outlined by an ex-lawyer, and written for an MFA senior project. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, and if I hadn't felt like must of the book was a waste of my time, I'd have scored it more charitably.
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