OUR MUTUAL HOUSEGUEST

By BRUCE HANDY

I AM NOT ASHAMED TO ADMIT THAT I WATCHED AS MUCH OF the O.J. Simpson trial as humanly possible (I'd guess I caught about a third of the 685 hours carried on COURT TV). Not only that, I've survived to tell the tale. I'm perfectly fine, no ill side effects whatsoever--except for this one peculiar thing that keeps happening whenever I contemplate telling a white lie or giving rein to a less than charitable impulse. Not that I do this very often, of course. But when I do, I now find myself subjected to involuntary cross-examination by a teeny little, very incredulous Barry Scheck voice. I think this is what psychiatrists call "internalizing." I'm hoping it goes away by Christmas.

But that's neither here nor there. The point I'd like to make is that my hours and hours of "O.J. time" were richly rewarded. Forget ER and Murder One. For anyone sentient, the trial was the most compelling show on television. In fact--this may sound odd given that the Simpson saga will probably go down in history as the signal TV event of the 20th century, outstripping even the Kennedy assassination, the first moon walk and any number of very special episodes of Silver Spoons--I think the trial ultimately transcended television. As testimony dragged on and on, slowly accreting detail and complexity, the drama in Judge Ito's courtroom began to remind me of nothing so much as an overstuffed 19th century novel, one of those ripping, 800-page doorstops from college, a real cinder block of a narrative. We got cliffhanger after cliffhanger, and more subplots than a contemporary storyteller might deem prudent. And thanks to the lawyers, we even got bigger words than most of us are used to in 1995--just like in Henry James.

But for me, the thing that made the trial so addictive on a day-in, day-out basis--besides, of course, the spectacle of a beloved celebrity on trial for murdering his wife in an unusually gruesome fashion--was the underlying portrait it painted of a particular time and place. Here was precisely the kind of teeming social canvas that the likes of Dickens, Thackeray, Balzac, Eliot and Flaubert used to such great effect. We met earthy Salvadoran maids, beadle-like cops, bumbling civil servants, stalwart limo drivers, beaten-down screenwriters manquas and, of course, comically obsequious houseguests. Occupying the top of the social pecking order in this modern-day Middlemarch was the defendant himself, living a life that would be the envy of any 19th century man of leisure: pleasant days at the country club filled with golf and card playing, nights lost to the social whirl, gentlemanly "work" that consisted of getting paid to play even more golf. Unfailingly gracious, our hero would receive representatives of the striving classes with equanimity. But Denise Brown, for one, discovered the perils of social climbing when she was so unrefined as once to suggest that Simpson was neglecting her sister Nicole; according to Brown's testimony, he literally threw the two of them out.

Kato Kaelin and Ron Shipp were much better at negotiating these sorts of Jamesian social niceties. Witness the famous houseguest's account of how, on the night of the murders, he waited deferentially for Simpson to invite him into the main house to eat the McDonald's hamburgers the two men had just purchased; the invitation not forthcoming, Kaelin obediently slunk off to his room and ate his not-so-happy meal alone. To my way of thinking, this was the most telling moment of the trial, although a close second would be Shipp's admission under cross-examination that he wasn't technically a "friend" of Simpson's so much as a guy Simpson kept around in case he needed police-related favors. For his part, Shipp got to associate with a onetime star of disaster movies. How often do we get to see the workings of a social ecosystem laid bare so neatly and cleanly? Balzac couldn't have done it any better.

And then there was the ending.

For some, Simpson's acquittal was like the denouement of a Dickens novel, in which, typically, a stunning reversal of fortune restores some sense of moral order to an unjust world. We smile as the good and simple hero is tearfully reunited with his steadfast, prayerful family. We can also hope that, as would be the case with a Tolstoyan hero, Simpson's travails will have led him to wisdom, humility and spiritual understanding. No doubt this will be topic No. 1 on his proposed pay-per-view extravaganza.

For others of us, the verdict may have struck a more Balzacian note, a cynical coup de grace to a narrative that drew moral force only from its remorseless exposure of the ways in which the powerful and crafty work their wills. Justice may not have been done, but we can enjoy the sour comfort of having had our worst suspicions about money and human nature confirmed. In this regard--and at the risk of subverting my premise here--the works that kept coming to mind most often last week were the Godfather movies, specifically Michael Corleone's line about what history has taught us. If you don't remember, rent it.

All in all, this was a hell of a trial. Don't listen to people who say it was shallow and tawdry and not worthy of your obsessive attention. It was the stuff of great literature--which is to say, the stuff of life itself. But now it's over, and I for one have a lot of time on my hands. Maybe I'll finally get through Bleak House.