Word: turow
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Dates: during 1977-1977
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...SCOTT TUROW had gone to law school anywhere but Harvard, he couldn't have written a book about his first year. Or at least, he couldn't have gotten it published. It says a lot about the publishing industry in America that One L, all 300 pages of it, could appear in bookstores throughout the country: not satisfied with the coverage given the Harvard Law School in Paper Chase and Love Story, G.P. Putnam's Sons had to jump into the act--an act that doesn't exist, say, for law schools at the University of Wisconsin or Boston University...
...really Turow's fault that Harvard's name carries the prestige it does, but he certainly goes out of his way to exploit it. He prefaces his book--essentially a blow-by-blow account or his first year--with his excuse, suggesting he decided to write about Harvard because it's the oldest and biggest law school (which he says makes the experience of students here exemplary of all law students in America), and, of course, because he goes here. Nonsense. One L is a paean to status symbols, a description of Turow's willing indoctrination into the country...
Formerly a teacher of creative writing at Stanford--you wouldn't know it from the prose in One L, which has outrageous errors like "least painless" instead of "most painless" or "least painful"--Turow says he came to Harvard to meet his enemy. Who is the enemy? Good question. For most of One L, Turow wanders around that point, never quite explaining the theme that's supposed to tie the daily experiences together. Is it the legal system as it sustains class society and the state? Is it Harvard Law School as it breeds privilege and promotes inequality? Just what...