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If I were accused of a crime, I'd want Scott Turow to be my lawyer --- or my judge. I am greatly moved by the decency, complexity and intelligence of his surrogates: flawed, Hamlet-like figures from Rusty Sabich of PRESUMED INNOCENT to George Mason of PERSONAL INJURIES (who now reappears in LIMITATIONS). Not to knock John Grisham, whose ingenious plotting and extreme readability I appreciate, but his characters are pure cardboard. Turow is the anti-Grisham; he has a gift for storytelling and, even more, a deep sense of humanity that gives his books texture and weight. No one else could make moral ambivalence so darned entertaining.
Mason, the protagonist of LIMITATIONS, is a former defense lawyer turned appeals court judge, and naturally he operates in Kindle County, Illinois, Turow's fictional home territory. As the book begins he is one of a three-man judicial panel hearing People v. Warnovits, the case of a gang rape by ice hockey players that took place seven years ago (the crime has similarities to a 2004 scandal involving the Duke University lacrosse team). Mason's response is complicated by the guilty memory of his involvement in a similar sexual assault while in college. He is also terrified by his wife's thyroid cancer, disturbed by a series of threatening and mysterious emails, and ambivalent about running for another term as appellate judge.
That's a lot of plates to send spinning into the air, but Turow doesn't drop any: In the course of this short novel (only 197 pages) we learn the surprising truth about who's behind the frightening messages, find out how the panel rules on the rape case, and get a prognosis for Mason's wife and his own political future.
There is plenty of action, in other words --- but what really struck me were Turow's quietly dazzling powers of description and psychological acuteness. It is not just George Mason who lives and breathes and comes alive for us; the supporting characters have their own distinctive, sardonic energy. A prosecuting attorney's suit, "as usual, looked as if it had been stuffed into his desk drawer for storage overnight." Mason's assistant has a "stiff jet hairdo, a daily monument to the tensile strength of the polymers in her hair spray." The chief of Court Security, 5'1" Marina Giornale, "makes up for size in energy. She issues greetings to the accompaniment of her raucous, rattling smoker's laugh and applies her usual robust handshake. She sports a black mullet, and no cosmetics."
In LIMITATIONS Turow really makes us see the people who occupy the halls and chambers and courtrooms. And he makes us feel the moral and psychological weight of Mason's preoccupations. The fact that the judge's rulings matter, that he is "trusted to be the conscience of [his] community," makes his work satisfying but burdensome. He feels "caged by the proprieties of the role he's taken on"; he wears a suit and tie every day because he feels "he must lead by example in matters large and small." Usually decisive --- "it's a job requirement and one at which he normally excels" --- on the rape case he is uncharacteristically stuck, and he is honest about his angst: "Who are we to judge?" this judge asks.
What a mensch. Turow may be semi-sociological in his depiction of the legal system (there are plenty of fascinating insider details and villains galore, from major-league crooks to time-servers, weaklings and opportunists), but he is also an idealist, and something of a romantic. He creates not supermen, but plausible heroes. Mason, in his stumbling, self-doubting way, is certainly one of them.
LIMITATIONS began life as a serial in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, which perhaps accounts for its brevity and, I'm afraid, its weaknesses. Serial novels, of course, are a grand old tradition (think of Dickens!), but the slightly mechanical plot, combined with the need to make the end of each chapter a cliffhanger, runs counter to Turow's usual subtle, dense and leisurely style. The "limitations" theme is a bit obvious, too, referring to the boundaries of the judge's role and the possible death of his wife as well as to the statute of limitations, which is an issue in the rape case (normally, felony prosecutions aren't allowed more than three years after the crime). Overall, the novel tends toward the didactic, particularly at the end, where plot ends are tied up rather too neatly and Mason's draft of his (fictional) opinion in Warnovits is reproduced almost in its entirety.
Coming from Scott Turow, LIMITATIONS is slightly disappointing, but it's still better than almost anything else of its ilk. On page after page the writing took my breath away: Here, for example, is his account of what parenthood can do to a marriage: "You try to figure out how to survive nature's slyest trick, using love to produce someone to come between you." Or Mason's realization, after he is carjacked, that "a human being is only this: a single humiliated fiber that wants desperately to live."
A man who can produce sentences like that can be forgiven anything, even an imperfect book.
--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman
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