| Show 2E The Salt Lake Tribune Sunday June 10 1990 Chicago attorney pens another gripping novel of suspense life in turmoil as a result of his wife Clara's suicide Returning home one afternoon absorbed in lawyerly abe stractions about yet another client — his womanizing brother-in-law Dixon Hartnell whose brokerage is under investigation by the Department of Justice for illegal trading — Stern finds Clara dead in her car from carbon monoxide poisoning All that is left of their 30-note year marriage is a that asks: "Can you forgive me?" With Stern's personal crisis as the fulcrum the story subdivides into two interrelated mysteries as Stern struggles to find out why Clara took her life and why the Feds are so obsessed with corralling Dixon The night before Clara's funeral Stern comes across the first clue in a neglected pile of unopened mail—a bill from a local medical laboratory for a blood test performed on his wife Was Clara suffering from some unspeakable disease? Had one of her periodic black moods slipped unno- 1The Burden of Proof by Scott Throw Farrar Straus & Giroux 758 pp 82295 No one on the ' contemporary scene writes bet-ta- r mystery-sus- - N pense novels than Chicago attorney Scott Throw In a genre over ""'"''' with crowded transparent plots and A super- - sleuths Turow's Scott Turow first novel Presumed Innocent was a work of serious fiction as well as a gripping tale of murder and courtroom drama Turow's second novel The Burden of Proof is destined to follow in its predecessor's footsteps Like the earlier story this one unfolds in Kindle County a hypothetical venue in the Midwest animated by machine politics and filled with criminal prosecutions The protagonist is a defense attorney Argentine-bor- n Alejandro "Sandy" Stern a man whose forensic skills Old World charm and unimpeachable ethics have made him one of Kindle's most prominent trial attorneys Readers of Presumed Innocent will remember Stern as the counsel who masterminded the celebrated defense of Rusty Sabich the Kindle prosecutor accused of killing a female colleague When we last encountered him Stern was basking in the glory of that triumph at the pinnacle of a storied career It is now three years later and it is a more subdued and introspective Stern whom we meet his big-cit- y high-profi- le Oa fakt gtibunt than help his own cause however Dixon feigns disinterest insisting only that Stern accept custody of a safe containing important "person- al" papers Stern's efforts to get to the bottom of the federal probe lead him to Margy Allison Dixon's chief of operations from the company's Chicago e "businheadquarters a essswoman vamp" with an Oklahoma twang in her voice and a memory for facts and figures like an IBM PC With Margy's assistance Stern confirms that the suspicious trades all purinvolving commodity-future- s chases for institutional customers fall into an ingenious illegal scheme known as "trading ahead": Before each of the institutional trades someone at Dixon's firm company has bought the same commodity while market prices are low Following the institutional buys after prices have climbed the first position is cashed out at a handsome rate of profit In order to conceal the illegal transactions they are recorded in the perfect hiding place the account company's "house-error- " where mishandled purchase orders are funneled daily and quickly corrected The intricacies of the unfolding story line are matched word for word by the depth of Turow's characters self-mad- ticed into terminal depression? Stem's suspicions deepen and turn to anger as he learns that Clara's ample estate is short $850000 following a bank withdrawal made five days before her death All that Clara's bank can report is that she removed the money by means of a certified check mac payable to an unidentified man At the same time the investigation into Dixon's shady financial empire moves relentlessly forward at t bc big-nam- - de- manding all the attention that the suddenly widowed Stern can muster When Dixon is served with a grand-jur- y subpoena directing him to produce company records on several large transactions Stern detects the presence of an informant Rather Boo k Review One of Turow's great strengths as a writer is that even relatively minor players like Margy are portrayed as personalities with unique personal histories individualized sensibilities and annoying idiosyncrasies Stern's character is especially well crafted The antithesis of the typical hero Stern is short pudgy bald and altogether inexperienced about life outside the courtroom A virgin when he met Clara and faithful to her throughout their marriage he has his first sexual encounter with another woman 40 days after Clara's suicide in an unexpected interlude with Margy in a Chicago hotel A later a more serious affair with a divorced friend further arouses Stern's dormant sexuality but he remains a novice in matters of passion themes of JewReprising age-ol- d ish alienation Stern is a perpetual outsider in American culture having immigrated to Chicago at age 13 much as his father a German physician settled in Argentina a decade before World War H Instructed to "speak the English of an Eton schoolboy" in his homeland he has never mastered the idioms of everyday life in America and converses in pristine prose without the use of any contractions Hemm gW ay heir apparent is Richard Ford I Wildlife by Richard Ford Atlantic Monthly Press 177 pp $1895 Richard Ford's fourth novel confirms that he even more than the late Raymond Carver is the principal heir of Ernest Hemingway in language subject matter and esthetic strategy: the simple colloquial sentences the concentration on what TS Eliot called the "objective correlative" and Hemingway defined as "the sequence of motion and fact that made the emotion" for male characters who have almost no other means of thinking about or even knowing what they feel But Wildlife also points up bow far Ford has gone beyond the constricted mental territory of the typical Hemingway man who was always telling himself not to think about this or that specific pain or loss the "casualties" that collectively were the mainspring of his talent the aggregate wound that bent his bow Especially when it came to the excruciating pain of childhood emotional trauma he never went beyond short-stor- y length in confronting it What Ford has done in Wildlife is fashion a beautifully modulated novel out of the kind of pain that Hemingway tried to contain and dispose of in tight little stories like "Indian Camp" and "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife": the adolescent boy's realization of his previously godlike father's weakness and incapacity compared with other men and the nearly unbearable implications this has for the boy's own aspiring manhood Wildlife is an extended working out and deepening of all the in the basic situation of Ford's story "Great Falls" collected in Rock Springs three years ago Both are set in Great Falls Mont in 1960 n narrator is 16 when the and where the father a rather indefinably "unusual" man has brought the family in search of opportunity against the wishes of the mother who hates this big cold empty place first-perso- "where the Great Plains com- mence" The mother inexplicably cheats on her husband confesses to him and tries unsuccessfully to explain herself to her son before leavmg home the father commits an aborted act of violence intended to be conclusive but that instead makes him look fool- ish and cowardly Ford's men though they are outdoorsmen and men of action are more passive and brooding than Hemingway's they wait for things to happen that will tell them where their lives are going and when that doesn't work they make some precipitate move that catalyzes a situation they didn't want and can't resolve by action "Things seldom end in one event" is one of the lessons learned by Jack-l- e the young narrator of "Great Falls" as he muses on why these "unhappy things" happened to his parents He is more concerned with the motives of the three grownups and what they might mean about people in general than in the event's still unfathomable emotional effect on himself which is fully explored by young Joe in Wildlife Possibly the answer "is simple" Jackie concludes in the story: "It is some coldness in us all just low-lif- e full-leng- th - 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(601)295-301- 004328-258- it- STNeroF '17" ZION BOOK STORE 254 SOUTH MAIN LIT84i01 SALT LAKE CITY Mao-elate- When Margy Allison is unable to find the signature cards for the Wunderkind account the presence of the informer is felt again as Klonsky subpoenas Stern to produce Dixon's safe before the grand Jury The only trouble is the safe has disappeared from Stern's office If all this seems like an early indictment of Dr Cawley and Dixon rest assured — the real mystery is just beginning Although some may find the final resolution a trifle contrived the outstanding merit of this book lies not so much in how it unwinds as in the ultimate message it resonates — that in life and in law there is always moral ambiguity that it is people not abstract principles who matter most and that carefree happy endings are nothing if not improbable — Blum for The Los Angeles Times 40 Blum is a public-intereattorney and writer living in Los 11 1':4- i 7 es Moments in the lives of 100 centenarians ( SC4s414 ' MAIL AND PHONE ORDERS WELCOME Wrote Sam Weller Books 254 So Main Sall Lake City Utah 84101 or ) phone (801)328-258Utah residents add 625 sales tax Add 6200 postage for find book and $100 tor each additional book Major Credit Cards are welcome entity called Wunderkind anti-herp- - I 'It t sA: 30 k ' - AA' 14 114 44 iti - ql el6' ' ' i im- pending divorce settlement? The evidence including Nate's evasiveness and the fact that Stern finds a prescription in Nate's name for the drug acyclovir is highly suspicious The evidence is also highly suggestive of Dixon's guilt as Stern learns that each of the illegal trades was accashed out of the house-erro- r count into holdings registered to an - 1 - l the $850000 to help with his Get Ready Get Set Get Dressed 4 IA) 1 iftii : :' v List li m 116c fp 2 1 Weeks (Co) 20 A - E '11 io 7 FREE GIFTWRAPPING -- i II 18 ar 31 Week Me 011at Waldo &wok Honked Wee VASheut Gem Iffenster's MA Mew Ceingiate BooKs -- : 38 AND WE WILL MAIL ANYWHERE - : 6 6 4 SAM WELLER ---s pAbato 83 Last Disekonort Wohtest's Now World Obetionory 5tman & Sanas and Abutions -?-- I Lod I Dam Boers Timm 4A bow A Abgensonds 2034 Nalsall 1 41 Wenn 5 days Purely by what she does and says we can see her mind and emotions at work separating herself from her husband particularly in a sustained scene — or sequence of scenes — of 60 pages or so all contained in one masterly chapter in which she takes up with Warren Miller a veteran of both World War II and Korea who offers her a job in one of the several Great Falls businesses he owns She and young Joe go to dinner at Miller's home and the scene where Joe watches the two grownups getting drunker and more transparently lustful toward each other is a marvel of narrative observation The matching scene when Joe confronts Jean at breakfast the morning after catching her with Miller is equally fine Here Ford fully achieves the Hemingway ideal of language that's as clear as painting or action — language that is action In Wildlife he accomplishes the most thoroughly worked-ou- t expression of human feeling I've read since James Agee's A Death in the Family which also was about a boy's loss of parenthood but of a more conventional kind and perhaps the less painful for lacking the particularly bitter truth that Ford's two youthful narrators have to absorb though Jackie in "Great Falls" has not yet begun to see it: "What there is to learn from almost any human experience" thinks Joe in the novel "is that your own interests usually do not come first where other people are concerned — even the people who love you — and that is all right It can be lived with" — Joseph Coates Chicago Tribune I A kesoollansows Flogo Week 5 10 At YANA VAI 20 it Pete B 9 and Helm 3 lady Pis Weal : 16 5 Owlet be- AN I Weed To Know I Loomed In landsededen tutwhom 5 It Wes On tire Wino I Loy Down Os & Fuldhum 7 Wry Pokes boots & the Atens Nixon 9 Hood Pink Cousins & Con Watson and 10 Pathos 8 no We lostehme al the moan 5 some helplessness that causes us to misunderstand life when it is pure and plain and makes us no more or less than animals who meet on the road — watchful unforgiving without patience or desire" Though a cynic could draw the same conclusion from the novel it's clear that Ford found the story's answer too simple and needed to sound the people involved and somehow extend his (and our) knowledge of how life works: To illuminate what remains a mystery but becomes in this book a larger richer one Young Joe's father Jerry is a natural athlete who became an itinerant golf pro because the game "was easy for him" He brings the family to Great Falls "at the time of the Gypsy Basin oil boom" wanting "a piece of that good luck before it all collapsed " As a teaching pro at the country club he knows he "won't get rich working for rich men but we might get lucky hanging around them" Instead he gets fired on suspicion of theft and even after the mistake is discovered and he is offered his job back be feels the need for a new direction a new definition of himself In the fall he goes off to fight the forest fires that have been raging all summer "in the timber canyons beyond Augusta and Choteau" — a move that is violently opposed by his wife Jean who comes from timber country and knows more about fighting forest fires than he does The best parts of this consistently fine novel are the extended passages showing Jean's reactions to what she insists on seeing as Jerry's defection though in fact he's gone only three Clara's lover? Had Clara given him Painfully aware of his personal shortcomings Stern finds himself continually reflecting on his inability to notice Clara's suffering until it was too late Similarly his deficiencies as a father are evident in his relations with his three children particularly with estranged son Peter a doctor and his mother's favorite whom Stern suspects of holding back information on the causes of the suicide A former assistant US attorney himself Throw develops the inherent tensions and gamesmanship between prosecution and defense with dispatch and precision On balance however he displays a decidedly bias as illustrated by Stem's musings daring a court appearance that the zealous federal attorneys that he encountered "were like cigar-stor- e Indians to many of the judges: fungible young functionaries routinely clamoring for justice" To Stem by contrast the law Is often "a nasty business" concerned with governing "misfortune the slights and injuries of our social existence that were otherwise wholly random The law's object was to let the seas engulf only those who had been selected for drowning on an orderly basis" Stern finds out that Clara's blood test was for genital herpes a condition that his next-doneighbor Dr Nate Cawley had been treating unbeknownst to Stern Was Nate whose own marriage is on the rocks k - 1 |
