Maven of legal thrillers overdoes it
Print Edition
It is always a pleasure to visit Kindle County, Scott Turow’s shadow version of greater Chicago, which he has been building and populating since he all but created the modern legal thriller in 1987 with “Presumed Innocent.” One of the many satisfactions of the string of gripping novels since then has been returning to the county’s courtrooms and barrooms, catching glimpses of characters who were central to earlier works.
But not every trip to Kindle County is equally rewarding. This latest one, “Identical,” is stuffed with so many themes and reversals that readers may end up feeling the way you do after a long family meal with too much talk and food: disoriented and a little nostalgic. Turow has many gifts. He might consider being a little more parsimonious in doling them out.
Yes, he wants to stretch. So he has set himself new challenges, working with a classical template apparently meant to give his tale literary weight. The stew gets awfully rich.
The novel takes its inspiration from the myth of Castor and Pollux, the twin brothers born to Leda after she was raped by Zeus. There are frequent references to twins in mythology, Shakespeare and the Bible, in what seems an attempt to give more heft to a perfectly good thriller.
It starts with an italicized flashback to a lawn party on Labor Day weekend in 1982, and the passage is as dense as a standardized reading-comprehension test. Turow introduces us to many of the main characters, most of whom bear the names of Greek gods or variations on them.
The patriarch hosting the party is Zeus Kronon; his daughter is Dita, short for Aphrodite. Among the guests are her boyfriend, Cass Gianis; his identical twin, Paul; and their mother, Lidia. The day ends in Dita’s murder.
The scenes set in the book’s present, in 2008, are altogether more inviting. They start with a parole hearing, with a man’s liberty at stake, in a low-ceilinged room with folding chairs and card tables.
Paul is now running for mayor, and the plot is set in motion when the dead woman’s brother accuses Paul of a role in the murder. Raymond Horgan, whom we met as Kindle County’s chief prosecutor in “Presumed Innocent,” is the campaign’s lawyer, and he has views about campaign finance law.
“He’s an individual exercising his First Amendment rights,” Horgan says of the brother, Hal Kronon, who is preparing to take out ads restating his accusation. “At least as long as there are five clowns on the Supreme Court who think that spending money is a form of unrestricted free speech.”
“An old fellow in a flannel shirt” at a town-hall meeting seems to set out Turow’s own views on this state of affairs: “If rich people could spend without limit trying to decide elections, we were basically back to where we started, when the only voters were white men with property.” Paul responds to Kronon with a defamation suit. But the suit is implausible.
No sensible politician, and certainly not one harboring secrets, would risk such a thing. The novel grows more lurid and pulpy as it proceeds, with enough running around and twists to make a soap opera writer blush.
“Identical” has many parts and moods. One might wish “Identical” more streamlined, but that would not do justice to the bustling landscape that is Kindle County.
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