Personal Injuries By Scott Turow Warner Vision, 28 September 1999. Mass-market paperback: 512 pages. ISBN: 0-4466-0860-2 Suggested retail price: $7.99 (US)
Reviewed by: R. W. Rasband

I have just finished Scott Turow's fine new novel "Personal Injuries" and it features as a main character a woman with LDS connections (as has been previously reported on the list.) Robbie Feaver is a corrupt young lawyer in Turow's fictional Kindle county, and he is drawn into a sting operation against several corrupt judges. His FBI minder is Evon Miller (not her real name.) Part of her cover story is that she is a Mormon who ostentatiously refuses in public alcohol, tobacco, and coffee. It turns out that Evon, in her real life, doesn't consider herself a Mormon although her father was and she herself was brought up LDS as a child. (Turow says that as consolations in her private life she has "her church and her choir" -- a contradiction than can be resolved only if she attends a different church as an adult; Turow never makes this clear.)

It turns out that Evon struggles with homosexual tendencies, as well as self-doubt and loneliness. She could be dismissed as just another fashionable lesbian in a best-selling novel, but Turow manages with great empathy to make her into an individual, not a stereotype. She is really quite a touching character. Her Mormonism is not depicted with much depth, however. Turow equates Mormonism with sexual and social repression -- at certain points Evon might as well be depicted as growing up Amish. She reminds me a little of Senator Brigham Anderson in Allen Drury's 1959 blockbuster novel "Advise and Consent", another Mormon character who struggled with his sexuality. Drury also was inconsistent in his portrait of Mormonism: he seemed to think that the church had a professional ministry from which Anderson escaped being recruited into. Likewise, Turow writes that Evon's cover story is that she is devoutly LDS; nevertheless she is expected to pose as Robbie Feaver's lover as part of her cover story.

Personal Injuries is a terrific novel, probably Turow's best since Presumed Innocent. It can be read on several levels: Robbie Feaver could be Gatsby, and the narrator, George Mason, (Robbie's friend) could be Nick: it could also be seen as a commentary on the political and legal battles of the past few years, with Robbie as Bill Clinton and Turow's ruthless prosecutor, Stan Sennett, as Kenneth Starr (the action begins in November 1992, the month of Clinton's election.) It is intricately plotted as usual by Turow, with some dandy surprises. And it turns into kind of a love story, with the putative lowlife Feaver displaying unexpected reserves of heroism. Not just a legal thriller like those of the execrable John Grisham, it is a serious novel about people struggling to transform themselves, change their lives. But Evon Miller, although a fine creation, is not a very convincing Mormon.

R.W. Rasband
Heber City, UT
rrasband@hotmail.com