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Harvard had changed him. "I learned a lot about myself in law school," he says. "I finally got over the '60s. I discovered that raging inside of me was a competitive, acquisitive little Jewish boy from Chicago." When an offer came to join the U.S. attorney's staff in Chicago, he and Annette jumped at it. "I thought it was the best job imaginable, that it had the power to help shape the community." The return to their native city marked an important rite of passage for the Turows, a sense that the onetime prodigal children had returned and were prepared to become adults. "I had been taught that all writers have to find their roots," Turow says. "Well, I found mine in the upper-middle class."
At that point he was not really a writer anymore but a full-time lawyer. The eight years he spent as a deputy U.S. prosecutor included Operation Greylord, a widespread crackdown and sting operation that nabbed corrupt judges and other scoundrels in the Illinois legal system. Turow successfully prosecuted, among others, a state attorney general and a circuit-court judge.
This was heady stuff for a young attorney, but Turow had something else on his mind as well. On his half-hour train commutes from his suburban bungalow, he had begun a novel, jotting scenes in a spiral notebook. Given these conditions, the book lurched along fitfully, and Turow often felt that Presumed Innocent would never be finished. "Eventually Annette told me to quit my job and get that book out of my system." He took the late summer of 1986 off and submitted a manuscript two weeks before reporting for work at his new firm. "I hoped that I had crossed the great divide between popular and serious fiction, but at times I thought I'd simply fallen into it."
The success of Presumed Innocent initially overwhelmed him. "I'm not a weeper, but a few weeks after the novel came out, I woke up early one morning and cried uncontrollably for about an hour. The realization that I'd finally done what I'd wanted to do for so long just floored me. It was both immensely satisfying and a little scary."
The financial windfall has had almost no visible impact on him. He and Annette still live in the house they bought five years ago, a four-bedroom affair on a corner lot on a quiet street. "I don't believe in living like a raja," he says. "I didn't want to buy a big house on the lake and then have people point at it." And neither he nor Annette saw any reason to tamper with a good thing. "After our early struggle to establish our values, we really felt we'd found our way. Annette's career as a painter had begun, our children had been born, we'd formed a family. Why change?" One small alteration. He wrote Presumed Innocent in the basement; now he has a second-floor study.
He is mildly apprehensive about the reception that will greet The Burden of Proof. He expects some reviewers to cudgel him with the success of Presumed Innocent and anticipates complaints that the new novel does not repeat the formula of the old. "But that was intentional," he says. "I was wildly afraid of self-imitation when I began the second book. And I'm proud of The Burden of Proof, particularly the portrait of Sandy Stern and his complicated involvements in family life."