Reversible Errors
By Scott Turow
(Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2002 — 433 pages)
Reviewed by Ina R. Bort
From the New York Law Journal
March 11, 2003
Fellow Americans, we are in serious trouble. I'm not talking about Al Quaeda, North Korea, or Iraq. I refer to the state of our literature. In her November 3, 2002 New York Times review of Scott Turow's latest, Reversible Errors, Wendy Lesser, identified as the editor of the ThreePenny Review, declares that Mr. Turow is "not just one of our best crime novelists; he is also one of our better novelists." This distresses me.
For while Turow is to be commended for taking on an important subject, the death penalty, and for introducing his hordes of loyal readers to the myriad pitfalls inherent in a system of capital punishment, it cannot be denied that Reversible Errors is a very badly written book. The plot had promise, but the promise is swiftly broken by Turow's style. Turow takes a very slow-going 433 pages to tell the story of Rommy ("The Squirrel") Gandolph, a man with an IQ in the low 40's, who finds himself on death row awaiting execution for a 1991 triple murder to which he confessed. His attorney, Arthur Raven, is a new partner at a fancy corporate law firm, and has taken the case, which is in its final appeal stages, on a pro bono basis.
Most of the remaining characters are the individuals responsible for Gandolph's plight: the balding but still super masculine Larry Starczek, the original detective on the case, Muriel Wynn, the original prosecutor whose ambition and sex drive know no bounds, and Gillian Sullivan, the judge who found Rommy guilty.
Turow drags us through Arthur's tireless efforts to exonerate his client by reopening an investigation long considered closed — efforts that inevitably call into question Starczek's, Wynn's, and Sullivan's reputations as law enforcers and lawmakers. For every character in the limited universe of Reversible Errors, something big hangs in the pendency of Gandolph's final habeas petition. Will Starczek's aggressive detective work, and impressive extraction of a confession from Gandolph pass constitutional muster? Will Wynn's candidacy for Prosecuting Attorney of Kindle County be ruined by the prosecution of Gandolph that she spearheaded 10 years before? Will Gillian Sullivan be forced to relive the public ignominy resulting from her swift decline from the federal bench, shortly after Gandolph's conviction, to a felony conviction of her own, for heroin possession? And, most critically, will Gandolph live or die?
A story like this has tremendous dramatic potential. The recent media coverage of the Central Park Jogger case — and the questions it has raised about prosecutorial procedures and the criminal justice system in general — makes that clear. But Reversible Errors just never comes alive. And a lot of it is really annoying.
From the opening pages onward, Turow adopts a ridiculous macho man tone. One can easily imagine him getting up from his computer after every few paragraphs to flex before a mirror. (In the back-cover photo, he does appear to be wearing some sort of exercise garb).
Take, for instance, this description of Ike's, a bar that Kindle County's cops are known to frequent: "Now Ike's was a destination for anyone on the job in Kindle County. There were two groups who arrived here during the week — cops, and the ladies who liked them."
How about this old chestnut: "When Larry [Starczek] came on in 1975, one of the old guys had said to him, 'You get two things with this job that you don't get with most others — a gun. And girls. My advice is the same both ways. Keep it in the holster.'" If Turow is America's finest novelist, Hugh Hefner is its prime photojournalist.
Part and parcel of Turow's he-man view of the universe is his undisguised disrespect for the fairer sex. There are two main female characters in Reversible Errors, both of whom are either prone to criminal activity, unrestrainable lust, or both. Certainly neither can function, or consider herself whole, without the presence of a man.
Gillian Sullivan, the federal judge/recovering heroin addict, only begins to see the point of living life once Arthur Raven enters hers. He's initially drawn to her because she has plenty of information concerning Gandolph's criminal trial, having presided over it ten years before. As they spend more time together, Raven realizes that Sullivan is attractive for another reason: she, unlike almost any other woman he's met before, will sleep with him. The two become lovers, seemingly out of desperation more than anything else. But when Raven learns of Gillian's former bouts with heroin, he — the man willing to spend every waking hour to figure out how to get his client off of death row — is, in self-righteous fashion, shocked and infuriated, and drops her like a hot potato. Only once he realizes that he's unlikely to get sex from any other source does he decide to let her back into his life. Witness their tender reunion: "She held fast to his hand. Gillian, who never cried, had cried, and Arthur, ever tearful, had merely savored the intense pleasure of having her close to him again. Sitting, he discovered he had an astonishing erection."
Muriel Wynn is another winner. With unparalleled originality, Turow portrays her as a woman whose stunning accomplishments in her chosen profession amount, in the end, to nothing, because she has never achieved true love with a man. Her marriage is devoid of passion, and her passionate on-again, off-again affair with Larry Starczek is heading towards a dead end. He's always loved Muriel, but never enough to leave his wife (of whom we learn nothing, other than of her saintly willingness to stand by and watch as Starczek cheats on her time and time again). The fact that Muriel has risen to the ranks of Kindle County's top prosecutor seems irrelevant when, "[w]ith the tingle that arose from Larry's presence in the quiet house she had a sudden sense of the wholeness that might have been possible in the love of a man."
Perhaps America's finest novelist was just having a creative lapse (a long one) when he wrote this book. We'll have to see what he comes out with next to determine if his latest error is, in fact, reversible.
