Reaching beyond the law, into human history

ALMOST 20 years ago a first novel appeared that was prefaced by these words: “This is how I always start: ‘I am the prosecutor. I represent the state. I am here to present to you the evidence of a crime. Together you will weigh this evidence. You will deliberate upon it. You will decide if it proves the defendant’s guilt.... [Y]ou must try to determine what actually occurred and ... if we cannot find the truth, what is our hope of justice?’ ”

The book was “Presumed Innocent” by Chicago attorney Scott Turow, a novel that drew extraordinary reviews and sold extraordinarily well, and the question that the prosecutor Rusty Sabich asked has been asked in varying ingenious and often troubling forms in Turow’s subsequent works.

It’s been easy to classify -- as we have a great tendency to do -- these novels as legal thrillers, part of the avalanche that arrived in the time of John Grisham because the tales were spun in and around the law.

It is clear now that’s a mistake and always has been. What Turow wrestles with is of a deeper and more complex nature. The correct category for Turow is rather that of a major American novelist rising from the tradition of the Midwest, such as Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis and James T. Farrell.

Turow’s theme, and what his protagonists struggle with, is a belief in the law and its clarity and beauty alongside the ongoing discovery of its shortcomings when dealing with the infinite angers and sorrows that haunt human behavior -- and that verdicts in or out of legal cases, innocent or guilty, can’t always answer the questions we seek, or untwine the emotions that never stop visiting us.

This idea came into serious focus with renewed urgency in his nonfiction book about the death penalty, “Ultimate Punishment,” perhaps in light of what he heard and saw as a member of the Illinois Governor’s Commission on Capital Punishment.

And even more sharply in his new book, “Ordinary Heroes,” a novel that starts in Kindle County, Turow’s own Yoknapatawpha, but draws its power when Stewart Dubinsky, a recently retired second-rate journalist and a man adrift, uncovers a cache of letters after his father’s death that draws him into the mystery of the man he thought he knew, and takes him and us far from Illinois and back into the heat and horror of World War II. His father never talked about the war and his son, the reporter, never really asked. It is only now that Dubinsky discovers a secret family history that upsides down everything he has ever assumed.

The first startling facts he’s faced with are that his father, 1st Lt. David Dubin, a military lawyer, was tasked in 1944 with arresting Robert Martin, a charismatic OSS cowboy classically gone off the reservation. But David Dubin let Martin escape. For that he was court-martialed and imprisoned. Then, strangely, the verdict is overturned. None of this his son knew.

Then there is a woman, Gita Lodz, Dubinsky has never heard of. And the revelation of a striking, shocking love affair.

Then there is his Jewish heritage, which is called into question in a way Dubinsky could never have imagined.

Then as Dubinsky pursues that primal need to determine what Rusty Sabich asked of every jury -- “what actually occurred” -- clues turn back on themselves and facts unravel from truth until he’s led to a kind of verdict that sits well beyond guilty or innocent, one that verifies indeed Dubinsky’s sense that “death deepens the wonder.” It should be said that there are times when Turow’s prose seems thick and clotted. You want to hack through the underbrush, but it is also in this awkward congestion that he builds the layers of three and four and five dimensions his characters and their dilemmas and emotions carry. And in “Ordinary Heroes,” there are sequences that sing with immediacy and complexity: a harrowing parachute drop; playing dead in the freezing snow under the eye of snipers, amid the smell of cordite, blood and human waste; the singing across a night woods of Christmas carols as Germans and Americans, enemies, join together before silence comes again as they await “the attack which all the soldiers on both sides knew was coming.”

In “Ordinary Heroes,” as never before, Turow reaches beyond his belief in and love of the law and into history -- one family’s and our country’s -- to discover anew that there still lie in the marrow of human passions motivations and mysteries that can’t be captured or categorized.

John Sacret Young, co-creator and executive producer of “China Beach,” is the author of the memoir “Remains: Non-Viewable.”