Word: sternly
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...Clara Stern, wife of the distinguished trial lawyer Alejandro Stern, back her Seville into the garage, close the door and start the engine? Who was supposed to cash the $850,000 check she left with her banker before she took her life? How did this reticent Midwestern matron contract genital herpes? And what is the connection between her death and the Government's investigation of Maison Dixon, a commodity-futures firm owned by her brother-in-law Dixon Hartnell...
...Burden of Proof has no such fatal attraction. It does, however, bring back Stern, and it shares the earlier novel's preoccupation with two of civilization's fundamental institutions: the law and the family. It is no coincidence that the heroes of both books are attorneys who discover that justice is not blind when it gets too close to home...
Like Prospero, Stern is a magician who confronts unruly influences in a brave new world. The Midwestern Caliban is played by Hartnell, husband of Stern's sister and his most troublesome client -- a "small-town boy made good, gone bad." To see him on the floor of the commodity exchange is to observe a force of nature: "He stepped into the tiered levels of the pits, shaking hands and tossing greetings like Frank Sinatra onstage, commanding the same reverence, or, in some quarters, subverted loathing." When he admits, "I've always wanted to do what other people wouldn't," Stern...
Evil? What an old-fashioned notion that is in an America where the seven deadly sins are taken about as seriously as the Seven Dwarfs. But then Stern, whose Jewish parents fled to Argentina to avoid persecution in Europe, has learned "the gloomy lessons of foreign experience." Although he is known as Sandy in the U.S. -- his home since 1947 -- Stern remains a melancholy outsider with strong immigrant convictions. "No person Argentine by birth, a Jew alive to hear of the Holocaust could march in the jackboots of authority without intense self-doubt; better to keep his voice among...
...Stern is a sociological immigrant as well. A recent widower, he repeatedly finds himself in situations where he must adjust to new customs. Sensitivity, he discovers, is outmoded. His physician son Peter sounds like an Army medic when he tells his father to drop his drawers during a urological examination. Daughter Marta, a lawyer, does not ask permission when she moves in to help with the Maison Dixon case. Women have changed in other ways. They are eager to introduce him to tricky bedroom maneuvers. "Did you like that?" asks one. "The wings of a dove," is Stern's courtly...