Ladies and gentlemen of the jury.
You have heard the charges against my client. The prosecution argues that with malice aforethought he wrote a novel, Presumed Innocent, with the intent of willfully endangering the sleep habits and on-the-job efficiency of millions of innocent readers. Furthermore, it has been claimed that my client is remorseless. The government asserts that his new novel, The Burden of Proof, contains a plot even more fiendishly complicated and irresistible than its predecessor. The prosecution would have you believe that said novel, Exhibit B, constitutes an imminent threat to the public well-being and to the gross national product.
This defense might as well rest; the prosecution has a watertight case. In fact, the imaginary charges against Scott Frederic Turow, 41, may not go far enough. They ignore, for example, the $20 million film version of Presumed Innocent, directed by Alan Pakula and starring Harrison Ford, which will be released this summer and will probably lure every Turow fan who is not still hiding from job and loved ones while reading The Burden of Proof.
And surely there must be a potential class action on behalf of writers, charging Turow with monopolistic practices over the pool of money available for new books. Presumed Innocent racked up several records. Farrar, Straus & Giroux paid Turow $200,000, the most the publisher had ever advanced for a first novel. A paperback sale of $3 million followed, another first-novel first. Then came a million dollars more from Hollywood, and royalties from the 18 foreign-language editions of the novel are still rolling in. Neither Turow nor FS&G will disclose the financial arrangements surrounding The Burden of Proof; what is known is that the author wanted to stay with his original publisher, and his publisher was eager to oblige. But the new novel has already attracted more than $3.2 million for the paperback rights alone. What scribbling starveling, faced with debts and rejection slips -- and knowing that Turow is in addition a handsomely paid lawyer -- could resist the impulse to sue?
But making a federal case out of Turow's success may not be the best way to understand it or the man behind it. He is indisputably a successful Chicago attorney, with a billable rate of $220 an hour, dedicated to the system that rewards him. On the other hand, he has made his mark as an author by dramatizing the limits of legalisms. Both Presumed Innocent and The Burden of Proof weave and coil intricately around the same point: without the law, civilized life is impossible; with the law, civilized life is only nearly impossible.
At the heart of Presumed Innocent is a murder trial, its intricate arabesques portrayed in breathtaking detail, in which the defendant is almost -- almost -- certainly not the guilty party. The Burden of Proof offers a hero, Alejandro ("Sandy") Stern, the brilliant attorney who defended the accused narrator of Presumed Innocent, who must reconcile his responsibilities to his profession with those to his family. As the novel makes clear, Sandy cannot do both.