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So how does Scott do both? How can he seek justice for those who pay for his services and continue to turn out best-selling fiction about the frailties of the law? Turow does not see the question as especially difficult: "In functional terms, the law practice always comes first. When my clients call, I can interrupt my writing."
He says this in his 77th-floor office in the world's tallest building, Chicago's Sears Tower, where he is a partner in the 300-awyer firm of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal. This well-appointed, bustling termitarium does not seem the natural habitat of a writer, but Turow blends in easily. He carries a suitably stuffed and scuffed briefcase; he wears dark suits and serious, lace-up lawyer shoes. (Occasionally some modest stripes on his white shirts will betray a whiff of bohemian raffishness.) His accent in no way distinguishes his speech from that heard in the hallways or elevators; he flattens his vowels and comes down hard on his rs, in the approved Midwestern manner, and tends to drop the final g from words like coming.
"I love the law. I always will," he says, seated behind his desk and facing a window with a northward view that embraces many of the landscapes of his life. On a clear day he can see Winnetka, where his parents moved when he was a teenager; closer at hand is the north Chicago neighborhood where he was born. Somewhere in between is his present house, where he lives with his wife Annette and their three children: Rachel, 10, Gabriel, 7, and Eve, 3. "I do regard the law as a noble calling," he elaborates. "But I can't shake the notion that the law is coming ((comin')) up short in its inability to deal with intimate human situations."
This impression is hardly original; jails are full of people convinced that the legal system has misunderstood them. What sets Turow's opinion apart from run-of-the-mill sour grapes is what he has made of it: serious fictional portraits of the present moment, when moral authority is collapsing and the law has become, for better and worse, the sole surviving arena for definitions of acceptable behavior. Disputes that once might have been resolved by fisticuffs or a few intense minutes in the confessional or private negotiations between squabbling clans now tend to wind up as lawsuits. The old ways form a staple of conventional novels; the newer courtroom focus calls for a specialist. By accident and design, Turow has trained himself to write both these narratives at once. He is the Bard of the Litigious Age, an expert witness on the technicalities of the current stampede to litigation and on the ethical and emotional conundrums that accompany it.
If Turow were simply a well-to-do attorney who dabbled in literature, he would almost certainly be hovering still in the ranks of the unheralded and unsung. He regards himself as an unlikely candidate for the rewards he has received: "I don't think anybody betting would have bet on me. I certainly wouldn't have." This is not simply modesty but the recognition that his progress came by way of a number of steps that made no particular sense when he took them. There is a circular irony to Turow's triumph: he finally became what he had always wanted to be -- a successful novelist -- by admitting failure and taking up a profession. The renunciation of his dream, and a lot of hard work along the way, eventually helped the dream come true.