Roosevelt's fictional Washington firm is peopled by soulless suits
struggling to outdo one another in racking up billable hours for heartless
corporations. The partners, either unmarried or divorced, live alone and share
a jealous mistress -- that abstraction called ''the law'' and its corporeal
embodiment, the institutional law firm fed by a parade of interchangeable
associates who earn their inflated salaries by padding their time sheets. (The
trick is that the smallest billable unit is the quarter-hour, so an associate
-- by working in five-minute units -- can bill 12 clients per hour, each for a
quarter of an hour.) The immortal law firm endures by eating its young and
adapting to the ever-shifting ethics and business practices of the
second-oldest profession.
The plot centers on several of these young associates, fresh out of elite
law schools and prestigious clerkships, confronting their Faustian bargain:
humongous salaries and the slim possibility of attaining partnership nirvana in
exchange for horrendous hours and the prospect of a mid-40's coronary. The
occasional excitement of a pro bono stint on behalf of a probably guilty killer
on death row breaks the tedium of thousands of hours of pro malo work on behalf
of predatory corporate clients. Prohibited by sexual harassment policy from
dating subordinates or supervisors within the firm, precluded by the 18-hour
workday from meeting anyone outside the firm, these legal eunuchs think the
occasional firm cocktail party or the early-morning jog to the office counts as
real fun.
There are no heroes at Roosevelt's firm, only compromisers trying to get by
without completely selling out. Nor are any of the characters in the ensemble
cast particularly lovable, though each has some admirable qualities that emerge
at critical times in the story. The plot is somewhat trite, and in places feels
secondhand. (One small plot point, involving a prison visit, seems to borrow
from -- or pay homage to -- Scott Turow's 1987 novel, ''Presumed Innocent'':
''Turned out he'd smuggled out semen during a visit, had a female friend, you
know, insert it and then claim to be raped.'' Sound familiar?) The main plotline
concerns a terrible industrial accident that results in a class-action lawsuit
against one of the firm's major clients. We've seen that before. Some of the
associates gravitate toward the big-buck litigation growing out of the
explosion, while others take on what appears to be a hopeless death penalty
case. The denouements of both cases are clever, if somewhat contrived: a
convoluted legal-financial scheme reveals a sordid conspiracy by corporate
malfeasants, while a computer glitch exposes an equally sordid DNA cover-up by
unscrupulous prosecutors. The associates may not be heroes, but compared with
the corporate and prosecutorial types, they are all St. Thomas More.
And yet I recommend this book with real enthusiasm. Why? Precisely because
it doesn't glamorize its subject. Roosevelt's gritty portrayal of the
transformation of bright-eyed and colorful young associates into dim-eyed and
gray middle-aged partners (no one seems to make it to his or her golden years)
rings true of all too many corporate law factories, which have turned what used
to be called a ''learned profession'' into a service industry that does little
more than help the superrich get even richer. Roosevelt knows the world of
which he writes. He has experienced the cynicism, careerism and opportunism of
the zero-sum pyramid scheme called ''making partner,'' though from the somewhat
rarefied perspective of a Supreme Court clerk who apparently became an
associate only to gain experience for academia. (One of his best characters
fits this seemingly autobiographical profile.)
My favorite character in Roosevelt's old-line WASP-y law firm, with its
overtly ''Protestant ethics,'' is the Jewish litigator (surprise! surprise!)
Harold Fineman, who ''had grown up in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn'' as
an Orthodox Jew. (I wondered how a Roosevelt, presumably more familiar with
Hyde Park than Borough Park, managed to capture the ambience of this Orthodox
Jewish neighborhood in which I grew up, until I noticed that he lists my book
''Chutzpah'' as one of his sources.) Having first tried to rid himself of all
traces of his Brooklyn accent and his Jewish folkways, Fineman comes to realize
their tactical advantages: ''Once again, Harold changed. . . . He strapped a
cheap plastic watch over the sleeve of his jacket and let his curls bloom. He
abandoned the hard-won precision of diction; he turned himself into one of the
rude uncles he'd promised never to become. And it worked.'' But it worked too
well, robbing him of his past, his present and -- as it turns out -- his
future. He dies trying to keep up with a beautiful young associate out on a
jog. Fineman's nondenominational, nonpersonal and nonmoving funeral -- with no
friends, no family, only associates, partners and a minister who never met the
dearly departed -- illustrates what one of the associates has previously
described: ''You give up half your life to get good grades so you can get that
top-firm job, then as a reward you get to give up the other half.''
The redeeming quality of Roosevelt's utterly realistic characters is that
they know exactly what they are doing. Unlike Faust, they are not tricked or
even seduced by the princes of darkness in their gentlemanly garb and corner
offices. They step onto the treadmill with their eyes wide open and their
antennae firmly in place. They, like the author who created them, understand
the world of backstabbing and sucking up they are entering. I recognize these
characters. They are my students, just a few years after graduation. While in
law school these days, students know what awaits them in the big firms. (I can
imagine them reading this novel and smiling as they prepare to be interviewed
by the hiring partner of one of these firms.) Why then do these very smart
young men and women willingly, even eagerly, embark on this road to perdition?
Even a novelist as shrewd and insightful as Kermit Roosevelt cannot answer that
question. Or maybe he did answer it after all: he himself left the
''excellent'' law firms for which he worked to become an assistant professor of
law. I can't wait for his next novel, about the dog-eat-dog climb to tenure at
an elite law school.