The Innocent

In “Innocent,” he’s exploring the many ways in which, time after time, we fail to under­stand ourselves, in which we miss or misinterpret the evidence that could tell us who we are. “If we are always a mystery to ourselves,” Anna asks at the end of Sabich’s latest ordeal, “then what is the chance of fully understanding anybody else?” That’s a novelist’s question as much as it is a lawyer’s.

NY Times book review on "The Innocent"


Nat reflects on “the screwy epistemology of the courtroom, where the million daily details of a life suddenly get elevated to evidence of murder,” and in this he may be speaking for Turow himself: a practicing attorney who appears to have become more preoccupied with the ambiguities of the law (which are many) than its certainties (which are few). The effect of spending a lifetime in the halls of justice, his novels suggest, is — or should be — a growing sense of the law’s incapacity to explain anything important about human folly. Justice may not be entirely blind, but it appears to have cataracts. It turns everything fuzzy and dim. Worst of all, it doesn’t know how to tell a story.

And that, in the end, may be the reason Turow continues to write novels, to have his bit on the side while apparently remaining faithful to his long-term relationship with the law. It’s clear in “Innocent” how different young lawyers like Anna and Nat are from older ones, who still have their ambitions but have been relieved of most of their illusions. Legal lifers like Sabich and Molto have seen too much and say, at times, too little. They’ve become cautious, reluctant to speak or act for fear of muddying the truth again. They play everything so close to the vest, keep their own counsel so rigorously, that they’ve become, in a way, strangers to themselves. It’s terribly sad when, at the end of “Innocent,” Sabich begins to speak for himself once more and what he has to say is: “Accepting the truth is often the hardest task human beings face.” (He’s also an epistemologist, of sorts.) By some odd process, Sabich’s repetition compulsion has led him to a kind of rueful clarity about himself, a belated sense of who he is and who, all along, he has been.