December 26, 2005

BOOKS: Ordinary People, Scott Turow (2005)

Every three years, like clockwork, along comes a new novel from Turow. This is his seventh, and it's quite a departure in many ways. It's not principally a legal drama (though some of the characters are lawyers, and there is a legal proceeding at the center of the story), and it's largely set during World War II.

We begin in the present, as Stewart Dubinsky goes through the effects of his father, David Dubin, who has just died. (Stewart has reclaimed the family name David had Anglicized.) Stewart knew that his father had served in the war, and had heard the family stories of how David had rescued his wife-to-be, Gilda, from a Polish prison camp. But he is quite surprised to discover a bundle of letters to David's earlier fiancee, and even more surprised to learn that David had spent time in prison after being court-martialed. Stewart's investigation leads him to the lawyer who had defended his father, and to the memoir of the events that David wrote while in prison; that memoir makes up the bulk of Turow's novel.

David had been a lawyer with the JAG Corps, and was assigned the task of investigating Robert Martin, an American agent who may have gone rogue; Martin claims to be receiving his orders directly from the OSS in London, and the OSS -- the precursor to the CIA -- is far too secretive an organization to simply confirm or deny this to David.

As ever, Turow is a superb storyteller, and he does a good job of keeping clear the many strands of this complicated tale. The battle scenes are appropriately terrifying, and the relationships among the many soldiers we meet are convincing (and appropriately shaded by WWII attitudes about race and sex). I'd prefer that Turow refrain from writing sex scenes; he doesn't do that well at all.

Fine and moving page-turner.

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