A Frolic of Her Own

Present Value

On a completely unrelated note, I just spent a cross-country plane ride reading a pretty good novel that touches on law-firm life.  It's by a real-life big-law-firm partner, so for once it got most of the lawyer details right.  Given how amazingly hackneyed some of the central motifs sound when you try to explain them (there is, for example, a running theme about how Blackberries promote obsession with work, and two of the characters are classic overindulged teenagers whose reaction to September 11 is annoyance that their TV shows are being preempted), it actually managed to be remarkably understated and fresh.

Times boosterism

OK, I know the Times has fallen on some hard times lately, but is it really credibility-enhancing to use their famous notable books of the year list to shill for books by Times staff writers?  I count a total of seven, the two most immediately outrageous-seeming of which - Friedman's and Dowd's books - garnered respective scores of 53 and 34 on Metacritic.  By contrast, none of the books on the 2004 list were identified as being by Times writers.

Chick lit

Much to my surprise, Rebecca Traister's piece on chick lit is actually kind of interesting.

Scooter writes.

Scooter Libby's bit about the aspens may be one of the more elegantly phrased coded messages ever sent by the target of a criminal investigation to a jailed potential witness.  And now Franklin Foer reports that his novel's not bad.  I'm almost, but not quite, tempted to dredge up a used copy on Amazon.

100

Here's Time's pleasantly idiosyncratic list of the best novels since 1923.  (Why 1923?  See here.)  Update: Evidently someone disagrees.

In the Shadow of the Law

I was intrigued by the synopsis of Kermit Roosevelt's novel In the Shadow of the Law, and it has so far been well-reviewed.   Nonetheless, the book has not lived up to its promise.  While there's a certain gossippy, insiderish pleasure in reading about the kind of people who have been my colleagues and classmates, the novel in general seems lifeless and overresearched.  It's hard not to feel that the author has taken "trend" stories from the likes of both the American Lawyer (law firms feel pressure to grow!) and Details (men are insecure about their looks just like women!) a little too seriously.  Moreover, anyone who's been through 1L will recognize that many of the cases in the novel are thinly veiled reworkings of actual ones: the Buffalo Creek disaster, the Ford Pinto's $11 fix, and many others.  There's nothing wrong in theory with incorporating real-world events into a novel, but Roosevelt too often uses this cut-and-paste style as a substitute for genuine inventiveness.