Violence, Nudity, Adult Content
By Vince Passaro
(Simon & Schuster, 2002 — 300 pages)
Reviewed by Ina R. Bort
From the New York Law Journal (2002)
In "Where Lawyers with a Conscience Get to Win Cases," a recent article in The New York Times, Thane Rosenbaum, a Fordham Law School professor, explores why today's American television audience is devouring legal dramas.
He determined that the success of these programs is attributable not to some sort of interest in, or admiration for, legal process or law itself. To the contrary, shows like "L.A. Law," "The Practice" and "Ally McBeal" are so appealing because they "attack the legal system for being obsessed with achieving correct legal results even if the outcomes are morally wrong."
Rosenbaum went on to explain that TV lawyers aren't just different from their real-life counterparts in terms of their waist- and hair-lines; what sets them apart is that "[o]n television, lawyers are capable of exercising moral judgment and have a private conscience."
In reaching this conclusion, Rosenbaum notes that, in its portrayal of the struggle between natural laws of good, evil, right and wrong, versus man-made standards of guilt and innocence, television has taken over where literature left off: "Writers as diverse as Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Melville, Kafka, Camus and Doctorow have long represented the way in which the law can crush souls and damage lives. . . . Today, this tradition of literary legal criticism is more likely to be found on television than in literature."
Happily, there is one author, and an accomplished one at that, who has ventured into the world of legal criticism that other authors have, according to Rosenbaum, left behind. Vince Passaro, a regular contributor to publications such as Harper's (where he is a contributing editor), Esquire, and GQ, gives us, as the protagonist of "Violence, Nudity, Adult Content," Will Riordan, a seemingly hardened, supremely cynical lawyer with a conscience that won't leave him alone.
Will is on the verge of making partner, or so he hopes, or so he thinks he hopes, at a prestigious downtown law firm. He's highly regarded around the office, and not just for his intelligence. Will has mastered the art of placating those who will determine his future: Sue, the partner who flirts with him incessantly, and Jack, the partner unable to speak to Will without expletives and lewd commentary. Will plays their game well, flirting right back at Sue, and communicating with Jack in the dialect of the locker- room.
We first meet Will as he's half-heartedly drafting reply papers in support of a motion for compliance in a matrimonial case to which he's been assigned. The firm represents the very wealthy and powerful Ron Adamson, who is divorcing his wife and battling her for custody of their two children.
This matrimonial case becomes quite another matter when Ron's wife is found dead in a dumpster off the highway, wrapped in a priceless Oriental rug. Ron is the prime suspect, having spent the weekend with his wife before her death. Against his wishes, Will is assigned to the defense team.
The assignment to Ron's case lands Will in a moral quandary. His one and only personal encounter with his client has hardly instilled much confidence in Ron's parenting abilities. One night, Ron, after attending a baseball game with Will and Jack, forces Will to accompany him to a strip bar, then proceeds, in the chauffeured car taking them home, to unzip his suit pants to reveal, for Will's benefit, a pair of red lace panties.
Will is less than eager to don the robes of a zealous advocate, particularly because there are two children's lives at stake. I won't reveal here how he reconciles his moral misgivings with his lawyerly obligations, but will say that Passaro presents a satisfying, if not entirely believable, solution. Perhaps most impressive is that Passaro manages to do so without a trace of sanctimony.
Will's other new case is no less anxiety producing. Ursula Murray, a young, outspoken, over-educated heiress to a cosmetic products fortune, has been assaulted and raped in her apartment on the Upper East Side, and has hired the firm to sue the building owner. Ursula uses her attorney-client relationship with Will as a license to send him emails describing her intimate, and deeply disturbing, thoughts on violence and humanity. Passaro frequently interrupts the novel's narrative with Ursula's email messages; missives at once graphic and poetic. While Will's reactions to the emails are never overtly described, their impact upon him is slowly revealed through his increasing impatience with, and inability, perhaps unwillingness, to relate to, others around him.
Including Ellie, his wife. When he's not busy climbing the slippery rungs to partnership, Will is presiding over the dissolution of his marriage. Ellie, who is also the mother of Will's two young sons, is very angry. She is angry that Will is always at the office, and that, when he is home, he is preoccupied and disconnected from his domestic surroundings. Will is not happy either. He cannot understand why Ellie hasn't embraced motherhood with unmitigated joy; why he comes home to a sweaty, exhausted woman, rather than one glowing with maternal and conjugal bliss eagerly awaiting his return. Things have not turned out the way that either of them had imagined. Passaro deftly describes Will and Ellie's squabbles, their frustrating inability to connect despite their love for each other and, ultimately, Will's persistent refusal to resign himself to the divorce that seems all but impossible to avoid.
Best of all is the backdrop against which these compelling human dramas are set. Passaro's Manhattan is, by turns, a chaotic, bleak, idyllic, vibrant and decaying city; a place of myriad humorous and depressing paradoxes, few of which seem to escape Passaro's notice. In one unforgettable passage, Will describes a lunchtime walk down Broadway to Battery Park: "I pass a businesswoman with a cell phone, standing in front of the corporate sculpture outside an office building, singing, 'The Itsy-Bitsy Spider.' I can hear how the conversation will end: No, honey, Mommy will be home tonight. Mommy has to work right now. When I come home tonight, I'll read you a book. What book would you like me to read? I imagine the child at the other end."
At the conclusion of his Times article, Rosenbaum laments: "Now if we could only figure out how to put some soul into the law and make real lawyers as emotionally raw and morally conscious as the ones on TV." If Passaro's depiction of Will Riordan happens to be based on real lawyers he knows, Rosenbaum has nothing to fear.
