Law and literature

Kermit (but call him Kim) Roosevelt’s debut novel IN THE SHADOW OF THE LAW is getting a ton of attention. Not just because of his background and pedigree, but because he’s written a legal thriller published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and well, they just don’t do that sort of thing unless your name is Scott Turow. Not surprisingly, Roosevelt, as he explains in this interview with the NY Observer, didn’t want to pattern his book after the bestsellers:

As ethereal—even metaphysical—as the book may seem, it betrays a deeper ambition: Mr. Roosevelt wants to pick up the legal novel by its fraying edges and drag it back to the literary heights whence it sprang. Think Dickens’ Bleak House or Kafka’s The Trial. He’s trying to prop up the legal novel, make it intellectual. This is a new kind of legal novel, and the oldest kind: the literary one.

"What I was trying to do was sort of combine Turow and [Jonathan] Franzen—that’s what I was aiming for," the author said.

But can one fashion literature out of the trials and tribulations of lawyers?

Today’s legal thriller doesn’t have many friends at that altitude of literary performance.

"I’m not very given to … sort of train reading," said the lawyer-novelist Louis Begley, when asked about the legal-thriller genre. "I’ve read Bleak House—also The Trial by Kafka."

If the high point of the genre was indeed set in the mid-19th century with Bleak House, the genre really started to proliferate much later. There was Robert Traver’s 1958 courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder. In the 1970’s, John Jay Osborn published The Paper Chase and The Associates.

Then came Mr. Turow. One L, his 1977 memoir of his first year at Harvard Law School, brought him acclaim, and his meaty first novel, Presumed Innocent, published in 1987, broke the genre open.

By the time Mr. Grisham burst onto the scene in 1991 with a page-turner about a secretive law firm that turns out to be a front for the Cosa Nostra, the genre had become an industry of its own—even if most of its practitioners had abandoned its literary pretensions.

"It’s not about evil partners making you work long hours," Mr. Roosevelt said over lunch. "It’s more about alienation—feeling like the work you do is not meaningful, not feeling like you’re contributing anything to society."

"If the problems are not such that they are of a moral dimension in the eyes of lay readers," said Mr. Turow, speaking of the genre’s constraints, "the novel’s not going to work."

Whether Roosevelt re-starts an old trend is tough to say at this point. But the reason legal thrillers took off in the first place was because marrying courtroom drama and high stakes turned out to be a natural fit, and and a formula that could be repeated over and over again. Intellectual pursuits, noble as they are, don’t always make for good reading — even if they might make great literature.