Word: turow
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...does Scott do both? How can he seek justice for those who pay for his services and continue to turn out best-selling fiction about the frailties of the law? Turow does not see the question as especially difficult: "In functional terms, the law practice always comes first. When my clients call, I can interrupt my writing...
...says this in his 77th-floor office in the world's tallest building, Chicago's Sears Tower, where he is a partner in the 300-awyer firm of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal. This well-appointed, bustling termitarium does not seem the natural habitat of a writer, but Turow blends in easily. He carries a suitably stuffed and scuffed briefcase; he wears dark suits and serious, lace-up lawyer shoes. (Occasionally some modest stripes on his white shirts will betray a whiff of bohemian raffishness.) His accent in no way distinguishes his speech from that heard in the hallways or elevators...
This impression is hardly original; jails are full of people convinced that the legal system has misunderstood them. What sets Turow's opinion apart from run-of-the-mill sour grapes is what he has made of it: serious fictional portraits of the present moment, when moral authority is collapsing and the law has become, for better and worse, the sole surviving arena for definitions of acceptable behavior. Disputes that once might have been resolved by fisticuffs or a few intense minutes in the confessional or private negotiations between squabbling clans now tend to wind up as lawsuits...
...Turow were simply a well-to-do attorney who dabbled in literature, he would almost certainly be hovering still in the ranks of the unheralded and unsung. He regards himself as an unlikely candidate for the rewards he has received: "I don't think anybody betting would have bet on me. I certainly wouldn't have." This is not simply modesty but the recognition that his progress came by way of a number of steps that made no particular sense when he took them. There is a circular irony to Turow's triumph: he finally became what he had always...
...gynecologist on Chicago's North Shore, Turow inherited ambition early: "I grew up with a very successful father, whose success I knew I'd be expected to emulate." His early years were spent in what he describes as "a nouveau-riche Jewish ghetto" filled with returned World War II veterans eager to get ahead; he recalls the "sense of identity" he got from that ethnic community and the loss he felt when, at age 13, his parents moved further north to the wealthy and Waspish suburb of Winnetka...