Defending Jacob by William Landay
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I was in Maui. I was on vacation. I had already read three novels. They were, each of them, kind of heavy. Not hard to read, not over-long, just, you know. I wanted something a little more pulpy. So someone recommended Defending Jacob. I’ve read my fair-share of lawyer novels, and police procedurals, and family dramas. They’re not my first go-to, but the person who recommended this one said “I think about that book a lot.” Compelling! So I gave it a try.
And now that I’m done, lawyer novels and police procedurals and family dramas are still not going to be my first go-to. I’m not saying William Landay should have stuck to just the one theme, I’m just saying that none of those themes made this novel any better.
Let’s start with the lawyer theme, the court-room stuff. Its all a little too realistic. Verisimilitude is supposed to be a good thing, right? Yes, if you need to be authentic—but authentic does not equal interesting. Landay tries, by giving the judge an interesting character, for example, and providing background on some of the other courtroom personalities—but none of it is put to any use. It’s just a trial. We only get to see theatrics in the book’s “frame,” where the narrator himself has been called to testify before a grand jury for a different case altogether. But it’s not enough.
Then there’s the police procedural, which kind of melts into the family drama sections. It gets started when the main character, an ADA, assigns himself to a homicide- but then he’s taken off the case, and the procedural sort of fizzles.
And then there’s the family drama, which is mainly driven by two contradictory ideas. The main character says, several times, that he knows his son, knows him well, knows him well enough to know that he is innocent. He also points out that his son is a teenager, and teenagers are mysterious, withdrawn, and live in a world all their own, impenetrable and unknowable by adults.
So I found myself shrugging through the entire read. I’m fine with an unreliable narrator, but not an unreliable writer. And then there’s two convenient moments of deus-ex-machina to, first, tie things up, and then, throw a curve ball so that the writer can tie things up again. In a slapdash, overly dramatic, sensationalistic (and let’s face it predictable) manner. The novel went from interesting to pedestrian to boring to cheesy.
I have no idea why the person who recommended this to me “thinks about it a lot.” I’ll have to ask.