Word: reader
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Stewart, much like Ladd, was born and raised in a traditional middle class, African-American family in Washington D.C. The reader first meets Stewart in the spring of 1963 as the enviable picture of success. She is a 25-year-old graduate student at Harvard and is married to her handsome highschool sweetheart, Lincoln, a graduate student at MIT consumed by the civil rights movement. Friends and family members look at the couple with pride and exclaim, "You two look just like magazine models", but looks prove to be worth nothing...
Still, Stewart is not a completely satisfying charcter. Ladd doesn't give enough insight or background for the reader to become familiar with her. The character is presented from a sterile distance, so that the reader has a vague idea of her, but little understanding. One of the most traumatic scenes, the moment that Stewart miscarries, is ended simply with the phrase "I had lost a part of myself". While this may be true, the reader needs more. What part of herself, and how did that feel? The reader is left to fill in the blanks...
Overlap is certainly the key to this novel. Overlap between Ladd, Stewart and the universal college experience is what gives Sarah's Psalm the interesting angles that snare the interest of the reader. Read the book and keep your eyes open for the author -- Ladd gives readings and presentations all around Cambridge, and can be found at the Bunting Institute...
This premise is, in other words, preposterous, yet Turow gets away with it. He does so in part by calling attention--before the reader can recognize it and complain--to how unlikely such a reunion of old friends within a single courtroom actually is. When Sonny asks her former lover if he plans to write a column about the upcoming trial, he jokingly responds with a question: "The Big Chill Meets Perry Mason...
...happenstance, we also recently spotted a man doubled over a Pilot on the New York City subway. He turned out to be Andrew Manitsky, a TIME reader, who was scrolling through page after page of sports scores downloaded from the Net. Manitsky, a lawyer who dumped his Sharp Wizard in favor of a Pilot, uses his new palmtop to keep track of schedules, phone numbers and the occasional great notion, as well as a link to E-mail and the Internet. But it's not all work: Manitsky also loads up the palmtop with gaming programs like Tetris and Space...