Staring at the World From the Other Side

Presumed Innocent

by Scott Turow

Farrar Straus Giroux; 431 PP.; $18.95

The Renaissance Man has lost stature in the modern world. The All-American kid parlays his assets into acceptance at a big-name college. The well-rounded undergraduate wins a free ticket to investment banking heaven.

And so the draw of pre-professionalism skews the consciousness of the new generation. Trapped in a goal-oriented society, today's would-be Renaissance Man often sacrifices perspective for high-level performance in a chosen field.

But concentration can prove blinding.

Take Rusty Sabich: intelligent, attractive, a son of immigrant parents now risen to the post of chief deputy prosecuting attorney in midwestern Kindle County. He is married to his college sweetheart; he plays baseball with his son in the park; he is well-respected by his associates. He possesses, professionally and personally, the trappings of success.

And he stands accused of murdering Carolyn Polhemus, a co-worker with whom he had a short-lived but passionate affair some six months before her death.

Rusty has spent the better part of his adult life investigating crimes like the one with which he now is charged. "How do you enjoy seeing the world from the other side?" Rusty's lawyer asks him before his arraignment.

This is the question Scott Turow makes his readers confront throughout the course of Presumed Innocent. The magic of Presumed Innocent, Turow's second book, is that Rusty--and through his eyes, the reader--is simultaneously the insider and the outsider. Rusty's own desires and friendships and infidelities and hopes are, at the root of it all, the cause of his predicament. And while the reader is not in Rusty's shoes, he or she is subject to the same desires that brought Rusty down.

Yet the reader sees Rusty not as a simple victim but as a driven person forced to pause and confront the complexity of his own mind.

And the red herrings, for all their abundance, never come off as mere plot tricks. Turow, a Harvard Law Graduate who served as an assistant U.S. attorney before becoming a partner in a Chicago law firm, doesn't have to bluff to be clever. Everything--the suspicions, betrayals, attractions--come off making perfect sense, psychologically.

Everyone comes off imperfect.

Presumed Innocent's finest moments are its courtroom scenes. Many of the facts pertinent to the case are known to the reader before any of the witnesses take the stand, and a few shockers surface during the proceedings. But the primary excitement is derived through the interplay--how will these characters, whose relationships Turow has gradually revealed, respond to the drama?

Central to the story's unfolding are Rusty's own reactions, as well. At times cynical, at others devastated, at others calculating, Rusty consistently challenges both himself and the reader to explore and analyze victimization.

Whether the victim is Carolyn, found bound and apparently raped, or Rusty himself, accused of her murder, the victim is portrayed as an active participant in the circumstances leading to the crime. No clear line can be drawn; there are no pure victims, no pure criminals, just the purity of emotion drawn from shaken people.

And passion, once directed only toward the attainment of certain specific objectives--a career, a child, a lover--is now dispersed, but not diminished. Rusty is obsessed with Carolyn, with the professional details of his case, with his son, with the fear that the intensity of his obsessions may never abate:

And now, dear Good, I think, dear God in whom I do not believe, It pray to you to stop this, for I am deathly frightened. Dear God, I smell my fear, with an odor as distinct as ozone on the air after a lightning flash. I feel fear so palpably it has a color, an oozing fiery red, and I feel it pitifully in my bones, which ache....Dear God, dear God, I am in agony and fear, and whatever I may have done to make you bring this down upon me, release me, please, I pray, release me. Release me. Dear God in whom I do not believe, dear God, let me go free.

Turow does not release the reader from the challenge proferred. This challenge is not to solve a crime, but to recognize that all people can play multiple roles--victim, aggressor, lover, thinker--without paradox.

Turow's book is laced fairly liberally with sex and seaminess. All the better. There's no denying that Presumed Innocent is a good read, in the popular sense of the term. In this case, it's an intelligent and fascinating read as well.

All involved must leave the courtroom with an expanded view of base human motivation and emotional capacity.