UP AGAINST THE LAW

By Paul Gray

A drive-by shooting in front of a gang-infested housing project leaves an elderly white woman dead. The police wonder what she was doing on these mean streets at the break of dawn. Gang leader Ordell Trent, a.k.a. Hardcore, whom witnesses place at the scene, accepts a plea bargain to tell what he knows. The woman, he explains, was the mother of his probation officer, Nile Eddgar, and an unintended victim; the gang had actually been paid, by Nile, to kill someone else--Nile's father Loyell Eddgar, an influential state senator.

As Scott Turow's legions of readers will immediately understand, this murder is only the beginning of an increasingly labyrinthine story. The Laws of Our Fathers (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 534 pages; $26.95) follows Turow's three previous best-selling novels--Presumed Innocent, The Burden of Proof and Pleading Guilty --in its portrayal of life, death and the search for justice in the Tri-Cities area of Kindle County, an imaginary Rustbelt terrain of remarkable moral and spiritual ambiguity. Once again a sensational trial forms the ostensible center of the novel while Turow demonstrates how inadequately the order in the courtroom mirrors the messy reality outside.

Judge Sonia ("Sonny") Klonsky inherits the county's case against Nile Eddgar and soon wishes she hadn't. Not only has she known--25 years earlier, in California--all three members of the Eddgar family; she also learns that Nile's defense lawyer is Hobie Tuttle, a former Black Panther and another old pal from her flower-child youth in California. Worse still, she spots her live-in boyfriend from those days among the reporters covering the trial. He is Seth Weissman, who is now, under an assumed name, a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist.

This premise is, in other words, preposterous, yet Turow gets away with it. He does so in part by calling attention--before the reader can recognize it and complain--to how unlikely such a reunion of old friends within a single courtroom actually is. When Sonny asks her former lover if he plans to write a column about the upcoming trial, he jokingly responds with a question: "The Big Chill Meets Perry Mason?"

That is a glib but not entirely inaccurate description of The Laws of Our Fathers. Turow's handling of the courtroom scenes and legal intricacies remains several cuts above the popular competition, including the creator of Perry Mason. Trial buffs, their numbers swollen by O.J. and Court TV, will find plenty to chew over here, such as Sonny's private ruminations on the bench about hearsay testimony: "The reporters and onlookers seem baffled by the arcana of the rule which allows a witness to testify about what someone said she would be doing in the future but not what she said she'd just done in the past."

But the trial of Nile Eddgar is not primarily what Turow's novel is about. He is concerned instead with the emotional states of Sonny and Seth, who loved each other during the heady days of drugs and protests and who now, a quarter-century later, are stuck with the care-worn grownups they have separately become. "Having had such high hopes for the world," Sonny muses, "are we the unhappiest adult generation yet?"

In this mode Turow's usually sure hand loses some grip. It becomes clear that Sonny and Seth--she divorced, he unhappily married--will sooner or later revisit their pasts and collapse into bed together. What seems a little surprising is that he offers her a marijuana joint afterward and she tokes up. And neither of these two intensely self-absorbed people considers the moral implications of their behavior--i.e., that Sonny's duties as a judge involve handing out sentences for doing the very thing she and Seth are enjoying.

Turow obviously cares about Sonny and Seth and the lost possibilities they might somehow redeem, so much so that he cannot give his main characters the ironic distance their actions seem to require. This triumph of the heart over the head is a weakness concealing a strength. For The Laws of Our Fathers gathers considerable emotional power toward the end. The funeral of Seth's father, a Holocaust survivor and once the bane of his rebellious son's existence, calls together a number of the novel's main characters plus a cross-section of Kindle County, old and young, black and white. The trial by now has been forgotten, although some of its secrets will be forthcoming. But for a moment, Turow bestows upon his roiling fictional terrain an interlude of peace; a sense, against so many odds, of reconciliation.