Scott Turow is the author of ten legal thrillers, including "Presumed Innocent" and his latest novel, "Identical". He is also a practising attorney in Chicago, the city that is the model for the fictional Kindle County where his books are set, and is president of the Authors Guild. In "Identical", Paul Gianis, a candidate for the mayoralty of Kindle County, becomes embroiled in a scandal after the release of his twin brother Cass from prison.
JD: This is partly a book about the collision of politics and law isn’t it? It’s also a book about the role that money plays in American politics—even, as you show in this novel, at the local level. One gets the impression that this is a particular preoccupation of yours.
ST: I hated the Supreme Court’s decision in Buckley versus Valeo in 1976. James L Buckley, brother of William F Buckley, was senator for New York. He was a conservative, but he was supported by the ACLU. They believed that the restrictions on spending that Congress had passed in the wake of Watergate were unconstitutional. And the Supreme Court agreed with them and found that spending money on politics was a form of free speech. Nude dancing is also a form of expression, but the Supreme Court says that can be regulated. Clearly when this form of free speech starts to impact everyone else’s right to speak—which it does—I think that’s incompatible with the basic model of American democracy. As far as I’m concerned, the equality principles on which the country was based are being tortured with the idea of unlimited spending. Now corporations can spend. That really defies my comprehension.
And you put thoughts like that in the mouth of Paul’s lawyer in the novel. That’s you speaking through him quite unambiguously isn’t it?
It is. “There are five clowns on the Supreme Court who think that spending money is a form of unrestricted free speech.”
And presumably you’d say that this situation has been made even worse by the Citizens United decision in 2010?
Right. Now you have the fiction that corporations are persons. This is questionable to begin with. If you told the founders of the United States, the people who wrote the constitution, that corporations would have political rights, they’d have laughed at you. It’s the same idea as letting a city vote. It’s goofy. It’s an extension of something that began in the 1980s with the idea that commercial speech couldn’t be regulated either. It’s why lawyers can advertise. Now it’s reached this absurd level so that entities that have no actual right to participate in an election, by voting, can still actively influence them by spending enormous amounts of money.
Do you think there’s any prospect at all of there being campaign finance reform in the US any time soon?
One of the problems is that the Supreme Court keeps invalidating any efforts [in that direction]. So in the state of Arizona, for example, they passed legislation that said that the more a privately financed candidate spent, the more public money would be given to the other candidates. And the Supreme Court said that’s governmental action which is burdening the right of free speech of the privately spending candidate. Again, I think that’s far fetched. You’re having absolutely no impact on that person’s right of expression. But they’re so politically motivated that they seem destined to stop any effort at reform.
This is also a book about public virtue and the quality of character we expect of people in public life. Do you want the reader to come away from the novel thinking that we make excessive demands on public figures?
My guess is that the people in the intellectual class in the UK do not regard politicians with the same suspicion that they do in the US. Certainly, among the public at large congressman are so poorly thought of that the public thinks they’re more dishonest than lawyers.
It's pretty bad here too, you know!
Maybe. Anyway, I wanted to write about a politician who is a good guy and to show how even a person of good intention can get steam-rollered by events. We expect our political leaders to behave with mythological greatness and virtue. And when you have that expectation they are bound to disappoint. We expect more in the US than anyone is capable of delivering. Nevertheless, I have a weird feeling about the increasing reluctance of people to judge politicians on the basis of their sexual behaviour. That certainly makes some sense, but I don’t know what judgement I would make if Bill Clinton were my friend. You know, this guy who just can’t keep it in his pants. I guess I would say, “Well, I love Bill, but there’s something wrong with him.” I do think [the Lewinsky scandal] exposed something about his character.
Then there’s Kennedy and the way the myth of Camelot bumps up against the sometimes grubby reality of his conduct, sexual and otherwise.
But fortunately for his legacy the brevity of the presidency allowed for a sort of mythological process to set in. It’s the Rorschach presidency—you can see in it whatever you want to see. People want to believe that he was going to stop the war in Vietnam—I think the evidence is a little short on that subject. I do think he was trying to pursue a civil rights agenda. What Kennedy added to the equation was the fact that he was the first television president. The guy was sexy. He added that component, virility, to the formula for success in American politics.
Did you have Clinton in mind when you were imagining the scandal around which this novel turns?
The case that I realised pretty quickly was influencing me was that of Charles Percy, who was a candidate for the US Senate. A mysterious intruder came into the house and killed his daughter, who was an identical twin. Percy, unlike the character in the book, continued in the race and won. He was regarded in some circles as an incredibly ambitious guy. I obviously reversed that case so that the identical twins are now suspected of the murder. But that had more influence than anything else.
Did the peculiarities of the Chicago political scene influence the portrayal of politics in Kindle County in this novel? Chicago politics is pretty dynastic and there's an inter-generational, cross-dynastic conflict at the heart of the story you're telling here.
Well the Daleys are certainly dynastic. The son [Richard M Daley] was really a great mayor and is lauded by everybody. When I conceived the book I was covering the mayoral campaign to succeed Daley for the New York Times. A lot of what’s in the book came out of that experience. Indeed, some of what Paul is thinking about why he loves the life came out of the mouth of Rahm Emmanuel [Daley’s successor]. He really is a fascinating figure. One of the things I realised is that I don’t think he can really control the asshole piece of his personality, but it served him very well because it means no one can accuse him of being in any way liberal, when in fact he’s pretty liberal on a lot of issues.
My own grasp of the nature of Chicago politics is shaped partly by reading the novels of Saul Bellow. Is he an influence on you, at least as far as the portrayal of Chicago is concerned?
I believe I’ve read every word Bellow wrote. Bellow’s Chicago and my Chicago are not exactly the same. He actually went to high school with my father. It’s something I didn’t permit myself to think about until both me were dead, but I was reading Bellow’s obituary and thought, “That’s where dad went to school.” Then I remembered my dad mocking “Solomon” Bellow, the guy he went to high school with. Bellow was very important to me, probably because I regarded him as a sort of skeleton key to a far more articulate version of my father’s sensibility. He ended up at the University of Chicago which, to this day, is terra incognita to me, as I’m a committed North Sider. The Chicago of Augie March is pretty much the Chicago of my parents’ world. It’s a great description of what I assimilated from them.
You’re a man who wears many hats—writer, lawyer, and you’re also president of the Authors Guild. You’ve been particularly vocal recently on a number of issues facing professional writers, notably threats to copyright and the reach and power of Amazon.
Almost every change that has taken place in the publishing industry during my lifetime as a successful author has made it a better and better time to be a bestselling writer. The problem is that the herd is being culled, as it were, by this pressure on copyright. When you start digitising whole books and making them available for search—between 200 customers you’re displaying more or less the whole book—there’s something wrong with that. That’s a copyright violation as far as I’m concerned.
What about Amazon? You've been critical of "predatory pricing" among other things.
This is an entity that is being financed by Wall Street, clearly in the expectation that they’re going to exert monopoly power. Nobody’s asking them to make a profit. Instead they’re just wiping out the competition. One way you wipe out competition is when the people who are financing the operation don’t require you to make a profit. So you can go toe to toe with anybody if you don’t have to make a profit or return a dividend to shareholders. It’s astonishing. But they’re remarkably innovative and they deserve a lot of their success.
"Identical" is published by Mantle (£18.99)
JD: This is partly a book about the collision of politics and law isn’t it? It’s also a book about the role that money plays in American politics—even, as you show in this novel, at the local level. One gets the impression that this is a particular preoccupation of yours.
ST: I hated the Supreme Court’s decision in Buckley versus Valeo in 1976. James L Buckley, brother of William F Buckley, was senator for New York. He was a conservative, but he was supported by the ACLU. They believed that the restrictions on spending that Congress had passed in the wake of Watergate were unconstitutional. And the Supreme Court agreed with them and found that spending money on politics was a form of free speech. Nude dancing is also a form of expression, but the Supreme Court says that can be regulated. Clearly when this form of free speech starts to impact everyone else’s right to speak—which it does—I think that’s incompatible with the basic model of American democracy. As far as I’m concerned, the equality principles on which the country was based are being tortured with the idea of unlimited spending. Now corporations can spend. That really defies my comprehension.
And you put thoughts like that in the mouth of Paul’s lawyer in the novel. That’s you speaking through him quite unambiguously isn’t it?
It is. “There are five clowns on the Supreme Court who think that spending money is a form of unrestricted free speech.”
And presumably you’d say that this situation has been made even worse by the Citizens United decision in 2010?
Right. Now you have the fiction that corporations are persons. This is questionable to begin with. If you told the founders of the United States, the people who wrote the constitution, that corporations would have political rights, they’d have laughed at you. It’s the same idea as letting a city vote. It’s goofy. It’s an extension of something that began in the 1980s with the idea that commercial speech couldn’t be regulated either. It’s why lawyers can advertise. Now it’s reached this absurd level so that entities that have no actual right to participate in an election, by voting, can still actively influence them by spending enormous amounts of money.
Do you think there’s any prospect at all of there being campaign finance reform in the US any time soon?
One of the problems is that the Supreme Court keeps invalidating any efforts [in that direction]. So in the state of Arizona, for example, they passed legislation that said that the more a privately financed candidate spent, the more public money would be given to the other candidates. And the Supreme Court said that’s governmental action which is burdening the right of free speech of the privately spending candidate. Again, I think that’s far fetched. You’re having absolutely no impact on that person’s right of expression. But they’re so politically motivated that they seem destined to stop any effort at reform.
This is also a book about public virtue and the quality of character we expect of people in public life. Do you want the reader to come away from the novel thinking that we make excessive demands on public figures?
My guess is that the people in the intellectual class in the UK do not regard politicians with the same suspicion that they do in the US. Certainly, among the public at large congressman are so poorly thought of that the public thinks they’re more dishonest than lawyers.
It's pretty bad here too, you know!
Maybe. Anyway, I wanted to write about a politician who is a good guy and to show how even a person of good intention can get steam-rollered by events. We expect our political leaders to behave with mythological greatness and virtue. And when you have that expectation they are bound to disappoint. We expect more in the US than anyone is capable of delivering. Nevertheless, I have a weird feeling about the increasing reluctance of people to judge politicians on the basis of their sexual behaviour. That certainly makes some sense, but I don’t know what judgement I would make if Bill Clinton were my friend. You know, this guy who just can’t keep it in his pants. I guess I would say, “Well, I love Bill, but there’s something wrong with him.” I do think [the Lewinsky scandal] exposed something about his character.
Then there’s Kennedy and the way the myth of Camelot bumps up against the sometimes grubby reality of his conduct, sexual and otherwise.
But fortunately for his legacy the brevity of the presidency allowed for a sort of mythological process to set in. It’s the Rorschach presidency—you can see in it whatever you want to see. People want to believe that he was going to stop the war in Vietnam—I think the evidence is a little short on that subject. I do think he was trying to pursue a civil rights agenda. What Kennedy added to the equation was the fact that he was the first television president. The guy was sexy. He added that component, virility, to the formula for success in American politics.
Did you have Clinton in mind when you were imagining the scandal around which this novel turns?
The case that I realised pretty quickly was influencing me was that of Charles Percy, who was a candidate for the US Senate. A mysterious intruder came into the house and killed his daughter, who was an identical twin. Percy, unlike the character in the book, continued in the race and won. He was regarded in some circles as an incredibly ambitious guy. I obviously reversed that case so that the identical twins are now suspected of the murder. But that had more influence than anything else.
Did the peculiarities of the Chicago political scene influence the portrayal of politics in Kindle County in this novel? Chicago politics is pretty dynastic and there's an inter-generational, cross-dynastic conflict at the heart of the story you're telling here.
Well the Daleys are certainly dynastic. The son [Richard M Daley] was really a great mayor and is lauded by everybody. When I conceived the book I was covering the mayoral campaign to succeed Daley for the New York Times. A lot of what’s in the book came out of that experience. Indeed, some of what Paul is thinking about why he loves the life came out of the mouth of Rahm Emmanuel [Daley’s successor]. He really is a fascinating figure. One of the things I realised is that I don’t think he can really control the asshole piece of his personality, but it served him very well because it means no one can accuse him of being in any way liberal, when in fact he’s pretty liberal on a lot of issues.
My own grasp of the nature of Chicago politics is shaped partly by reading the novels of Saul Bellow. Is he an influence on you, at least as far as the portrayal of Chicago is concerned?
I believe I’ve read every word Bellow wrote. Bellow’s Chicago and my Chicago are not exactly the same. He actually went to high school with my father. It’s something I didn’t permit myself to think about until both me were dead, but I was reading Bellow’s obituary and thought, “That’s where dad went to school.” Then I remembered my dad mocking “Solomon” Bellow, the guy he went to high school with. Bellow was very important to me, probably because I regarded him as a sort of skeleton key to a far more articulate version of my father’s sensibility. He ended up at the University of Chicago which, to this day, is terra incognita to me, as I’m a committed North Sider. The Chicago of Augie March is pretty much the Chicago of my parents’ world. It’s a great description of what I assimilated from them.
You’re a man who wears many hats—writer, lawyer, and you’re also president of the Authors Guild. You’ve been particularly vocal recently on a number of issues facing professional writers, notably threats to copyright and the reach and power of Amazon.
Almost every change that has taken place in the publishing industry during my lifetime as a successful author has made it a better and better time to be a bestselling writer. The problem is that the herd is being culled, as it were, by this pressure on copyright. When you start digitising whole books and making them available for search—between 200 customers you’re displaying more or less the whole book—there’s something wrong with that. That’s a copyright violation as far as I’m concerned.
What about Amazon? You've been critical of "predatory pricing" among other things.
This is an entity that is being financed by Wall Street, clearly in the expectation that they’re going to exert monopoly power. Nobody’s asking them to make a profit. Instead they’re just wiping out the competition. One way you wipe out competition is when the people who are financing the operation don’t require you to make a profit. So you can go toe to toe with anybody if you don’t have to make a profit or return a dividend to shareholders. It’s astonishing. But they’re remarkably innovative and they deserve a lot of their success.
"Identical" is published by Mantle (£18.99)
