The Burden of Proof by Scott Turow

First published: 1990

Type of plot: Suspense

Time of work: The 1980’s

Locale: Kindle County, a fictitious Midwestern American locale

Principal Characters:

• Alejandro “Sandy” Stern, a brilliant trial attorney originally from Argentina
• Clara Stern, Stern’s constant, reticent wife of thirty-one years, who commits suicide
• Dixon Hartnell, a financial speculator who is Stern’s client and his brother-in-law
• Sonia “Sonny” Klonsky, the federal prosecutor investigating the government’s case against Hartnell

The Novel

Based in part on the experience Scott Turow gained while working as a white-collar criminal defense counsel in Chicago, Illinois, The Burden of Proof employs a plot involving suicide and insider trading to explore the psyche of its protagonist, Sandy Stern. Narrated in the third person, The Burden of Proof consists of fifty chapters and is divided into three parts. Throughout the book, the reader shares Stern’s point of view. Although Turow uses flashbacks to illuminate Stern’s relationship with his wife, on the whole the plot advances in a linear fashion.

The Burden of Proof opens in a somewhat unorthodox fashion for a mystery, however, revealing in its first chapter that the pivotal event of the book, Clara Stern’s suicide, has already taken place before the action commences. As the book opens, Stern, who has just returned from a business trip, discovers his wife’s body slumped in the driver’s seat of her Cadillac in the garage, dead of asphyxiation. Stern, like his children and everyone else, has difficulty coming to terms with the apparent suicide of his upright, reserved, seemingly content wife. That Clara’s death was not accidental is confirmed when Stern finds a note in her handwriting that says, “Can you forgive me?” This enigmatic clue as to the reasons for her suicide is quickly followed by other equally ambiguous discoveries: Shortly before she killed herself, Clara wrote a check to an unknown payee that reduced almost to nothing Stern’s prospective share of her estate, and prior to her death, she had been taking medication for a venereal disease.

The scant evidence Clara leaves behind strongly suggests a desire to punish her husband. As the understated Stern tells a police officer investigating the suicide, “Lieutenant, it should be evident that I failed to observe something I should have.” In order to unravel the mystery of Clara’s death, Stern must look to his own interior landscape.

The outside world quickly intrudes, however, when Stern’s brother-in-law (his beloved sister’s husband), Dixon Hartnell, the owner of a commodities brokerage house and apparently Stern’s most significant client, is charged with illegal trading. The normally proactive, manipulative, and unprincipled Hartnell seems uncharacteristically disinterested in defending himself against the extremely serious federal charges he faces. Because the case against Hartnell implicates Stern’s son-in-law, John, an employee of Hartnell’s firm, Stern is forced to take an unusually active role in ferreting out the recalcitrant facts that will explain the extent of Hartnell’s involvement in criminal activity.

Owing, perhaps, to his preoccupation with Clara’s death, Stern fails to observe until late in the book that there is a connection between his wife’s suicide and the troubles at Hartnell’s firm, Maison Dixon. Hartnell’s unwillingness to be forthcoming with his attorney about the former results from his involvement with the latter; gradually, Stern realizes that although his brother-in-law is innocent of charges of insider trading, he is the one who gave Clara an incurable, if comparatively innocuous, case of herpes. It is Stern’s ambitious but injudicious son-in-law who carried out the illegal trades. Clara had attempted to save him, and her daughter, by drawing on money earmarked for Stern and by extracting a promise from Hartnell that he would take the blame for John’s actions. In the wake of Clara’s suicide—occasioned, at least in part, by her belief that the recurring nature of her disease would force her to reveal her infidelity to her husband—the typically unscrupulous Hartnell displays his own brand of honor by keeping his word to her.

While pursuing the dual mysteries that confront him, Stern must also struggle with his own part in Clara’s death. He is forced to come to terms with his failures as a husband and a father—failures that stem in large measure from his commitment to his demanding legal practice. Along the way, he finds a kind of salvation in a touching, although unconsummated, love affair with the pregnant, married, former cancer patient Sonny Klonsky, who is prosecuting the government’s case against Hartnell. He does not end up with Sonny, but it is largely through her agency that he comes to forgive Clara and himself, ending his story as it began some five hundred pages earlier, where it is first revealed that “full of resolve and a measure of hope, he would marry again.”

The Characters

Alejandro Stern is very much an outsider, a reserved, formal man, an Argentinean immigrant and a Jew, on whom the nickname “Sandy” sits not a little uncomfortably. Turow further distances the reader from his main character by using a third-person narrator who, although sharing Stern’s point of view, frequently refers to Stern as “Mr. Alejandro Stern.” Such techniques go some way toward explaining Stern’s predicament in The Burden of Proof, his alienation from his family, his incomprehension in the face of his wife’s suicide. Unfortunately, these techniques sometimes also make Stern incomprehensible to the reader, so that the mystery at the heart of the novel— why did Clara kill herself?—is never entirely resolved. Clara Stern committed suicide because of the consequences of her anger at her husband. Because the novel’s focus on him is not always sharp, the causes of his wife’s destructive behavior are themselves blurred.

In contrast, the portrait of Stern’s antagonist, Dixon Hartnell, is vividly drawn. Here, as in John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost (1667), the hero’s opposite number is more energetic and attractive than those on the side of the angels. Indeed, Hartnell is portrayed in terms that make him out to be the devil in disguise. Toward the end of the novel, when his sins have been revealed, Hartnell tells his brother-in-law, “I’ve always wanted to do what other people wouldn’t,” to which Stern replies, “I believe that is called evil, Dixon.” Although Hartnell bears the most conspicuous responsibility for Clara’s death and almost manages to destroy the rest of Stern’s family, he is hard to damn entirely. Stern’s attitude toward Hartnell is finally disapproving but indulgent: Hartnell may be corrupt and manipulative, but he is charming and daring and—perhaps most important—uxorious. He is clearly everything that Stern is not.

The two main female characters in The Burden of Proof are a similar study in contrasts. Clara, like her husband, remains elusive, a kind of vacant center around which the plot revolves. This sense of absence results in part from the fact that she is dead before the novel begins. Even after Turow attempts to bring her back to life in flashbacks, however, she remains more an embodiment of principle than a human being. As Hartnell says when searching for an explanation of why he seduced her, “She was a woman to admire.”

Sonny Klonsky, on the other hand, is only too mortal. A fortyish victim of breast cancer, she is also, when Stern becomes involved with her, unhappily married and pregnant with her first child. Yet Sonny is remarkably self-aware and self-possessed, and although she has far more excuses for instability than the genteel, monied Clara, she is the survivor. Doubtless it is these qualities that make her so attractive for Stern, who loves not so much the look of this younger woman as the wisdom she incorporates.

Critical Context

The Burden of Proof is Scott Turow’s third book and second novel. After teaching creative writing at Stanford University and receiving his master’s degree there in 1974, and before beginning law school at Harvard University in 1975, Turow obtained a contract for a nonfiction account of his first year of legal studies. One L, published in 1977, just before Turow began his final year of law school, proved to be both a critical and popular success.

After receiving his law degree, Turow worked for eight years in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago, during which time he wrote his first novel. Presumed Innocent, published in 1987, made headlines before it appeared, largely because of the record sums of money connected with it. Turow received an advance of two hundred thousand dollars from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the largest the publisher had ever paid for a first novel. Warner Bros. paid three million dollars for paperback rights, the highest price ever paid for reprint rights to a first novel, and film rights were sold to director Sydney Pollack for one million dollars. The hardback version stayed on best-seller lists for forty-four weeks, the paperback edition for twenty-nine weeks.

Before the publication of Presumed Innocent, Turow had accepted a position at a major Chicago law firm, where he worked half-time while writing The Burden of Proof. Like its predecessor, Turow’s second novel quickly became a best-seller. A third novel, Pleading Guilty, appeared in 1993.

Although all of Turow’s works, even One L, are fraught with mystery, his heroes’ respective moral dilemmas make his books memorable. It is the philosophical quandaries his lawyer-heroes face—those forcing them to choose between their obligation as officers of the court to uphold the “truth” and their responsibilities toward their families—that lend Turow’s novels resonance.

Turow’s storybook success as a writer revived the genre of the legal thriller, which has grown to accommodate lawyer-novelists such as John Grisham, whose 1991 novel The Firm dominated best-seller lists much as Presumed Innocent had done a few years earlier. Still, Presumed Innocent remains the standard against which the products of these other writers—and those of Turow himself—are judged. Reviews of The Burden of Proof were not as uniformly favorable as they had been for its predecessor. The strength of both books, however, is that they are told from the vantage point of a lawyer obsessed not so much with solving a mystery as with discovering the truth of his own involvement in an ambiguous death. The insight into the equivocal nature of morality, which seems to grow out of Turow’s dual existence as a lawyer and a writer, is clearly the greatest strength of his books, helping them to rise above the conventions of their genre.

Bibliography

America. CLXIII, October 13, 1990, p.250.

Chicago Tribune. June 3, 1990, XIV, p.1.

Dalton, Katherine. “Power of Attorney.” Harper’s Bazaar 123 (June, 1990): 38-39. Briefly reviews the novel, comparing it with Presumed Innocent. Chiefly rehearses Turow’s biography, emphasizing the phenomenal success of Turow’s first novel.

Diggs, Terry K. “Through a Glass Darkly: John Grisham and Scott Turow Lay Down the Law for Millions of Americans. Just What Is It They’re Trying to Tell Us?” ABA Journal 82 (October, 1996): 72-75. Diggs argues that Grisham and Turow’s distinctive portrayals of versions of the law stem from different historical perspectives. He compares Grisham’s novels, which harken back to the Great Depression, and Turow’s works, which recall the film noir that emerged at the end of World War II. An interesting analysis of the works of two contemporary authors.

Feeney, Joseph J. “Recent Fiction: The Burden of Proof.” America 163 (October 13, 1990): 250. A highly respectful review, finding in Turow’s novel an exploration of the conventions of Greek tragedy. Feeney does a good job of analyzing Turow’s style.

Gray, Paul. “Burden of Success.” Time 135 (June 11, 1990): 68-72. Cover story on Turow, including excerpts from interviews with the author, emphasizing his biography. Reviews both The Burden of Proof and the film version of Presumed Innocent. Turow’s second novel is praised for its substantial themes as well as its entertainment value.

Grisham, John. “The Rise of the Legal Thriller: Why Lawyers Are Throwing the Book at Us.” The New York Times Book Review, October 18, 1992, 33. Locates the revival of the genre in Presumed Innocent, the success of which has prompted other lawyers to write about their exploits. Evaluates other contributions to the genre.

Library Journal. CXV, June 1, 1990, p.186.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. June 3, 1990, p.1.

Maas, Peter. “And Scott Turow’s New Mystery.” The New York Times Book Review, June 3, 1990, 1. Compares Turow’s second novel unfavorably with his first. Maas finds the pace slow, Stern poorly developed, and the book’s themes overblown.

Maclean’s. CIII, July 9, 1990, p.43.

The New York Review of Books. XXXVII, August 16, 1990, p.45.

The New York Times Book Review. XCV, June 3, 1990, p.1.

Newsweek. CXV, June 4, 1990, p.78.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXVII, April 20, 1990, p.57.

Time. CXXXV, June 11, 1990, p.71.

The Washington Post Book World. XX, June 3, 1990, p.3.