Review of THE FINAL CASE by David Guterson

 3.5 Stars

I loved Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars but was unimpressed by his Ed King (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2017/10/archival-review-of-ed-king-by-david.html).  Because it’s been a decade since I last read this author, I decided to give him another try when I discovered a new novel had been released.  This one left me puzzled at times.

The narrator is a successful novelist who has given up writing.  His father Royal, 83, is a criminal lawyer reaching the end of his career.  In what he knows may be his last case, Royal agrees to defend Betsy Harvey, a Christian fundamentalist who, along with her husband Delvin, is accused of murdering her foster daughter Abeba .  Almost immediately after her arrival from Ethiopia, Abeba was abused; Betsy and Delvin are charged with homicide by abuse.  Royal is unable to drive so his son becomes his driver and attends the trial.  The book, however, is not really a courtroom drama.  When the trial comes to a precipitous end, the focus switches to the narrator’s personal and family concerns. 

The book examines the justice system.  Royal’s life has been devoted to the law and justice, often taking pro bono cases.  He believes everyone deserves a defender no matter what he/she has done; he argues that a criminal attorney must put aside his/her personal feelings and force the state to provide a solid case and accurately apply the law:  “’They might have done the most evil things you can imagine, and you can abhor them for it, but if what they did doesn’t conform to what they’re charged with, then they’re innocent.  And that’s important.  If you convict someone because they’re abhorrent, and not because they broke the law, you might as well live in a dictatorship.  And who wants that?  I don’t.  And another thing.  I play a role according to my lights and I’m at peace with myself.’”

In many ways, Royal sounds like Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird.  For instance, Royal says that trials are not like those shown on television where a last-minute discovery proves the defendant’s innocence.  He thinks he will lose this case:  “’So you end up doing the best you can while knowing, from experience, that it’s useless, it’s hopeless, and that if you’re going to take any satisfaction from your work, it’s going to have to come with losing.’”  Atticus says much the same to his children:  “’[Courage] is when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.  You rarely win, but sometimes you do.’” 

The reader will feel disoriented when the trial ends abruptly and the novel is no longer a courtroom drama.  The last one-third of the novel meanders.  It covers a lot of topics like the craft of writing, the predicament of being a white male in contemporary society, and the misrepresentation of tea drinking by Russian writers of the 18^th and 19^th centuries.  I could find little connection among these digressions and I haven’t been able to determine their purpose.  In some of these disjointed passages are rambling sentences of 240+ words which, though grammatically correct, leave the reader gasping.

What does stand out for me is the contrast between the Harvey family and the narrator’s.  In the course of the novel, the reader meets Betsy, her parents, and several of her children.  What emerges is a family where discipline is the focus.  Betsy’s mother, for example, goes on a pages-long angry and hate-filled rant:  “’The world’s a terrible place in her head, filled with terrible, horrible people who are one hundred percent wrong about absolutely everything.”  The judge perfectly describes the family in her summation.  On the other hand, the narrator’s family (wife, parents, and sister) are decent, dutiful, supportive, and loving – ordinary people trying to do the best they can.  Even when faced with a death, they accept death as “an eternal human norm” from which they are not exempt and they acknowledge there are things to be grateful for in the manner of that death.

The overwhelming feeling is of one of sadness:  Royal repeats, “’Sad case,’ he said.  ‘Very sad.’”  and “’Well, first, the main thing is how completely sad it is.’” and “’The whole thing was sad.  To tell you the truth, a lot of things in my work are sad.  It’s sort of a sad world to have to move around in.’”  The narrator agrees:  “everything about this case was sad, and that without much effort you could make the leap from the facts of this case to a very sad portrait of the human race.”  Abeba, before she leaves Ethiopia, is given a book with the warning that “it had been written for adults and was sad.”  A friend tells her to still read it:  “if it’s sad, so what, too, you already know about sadness, there can’t be anything in the book sadder than what you already know.”  The dramatic irony cannot be missed. 

Despite this sadness, the message of the book, as stated in the last sentences, seems to be to love people:  “’We can love people . . . What else is there?’”  Loving people does not mean “’disciplining out of love’” like the Harveys.  Unlike Abeba’s adoptive family who could not accept her, the narrator’s mother speaks of her admiration for someone “’who understood what it meant to respect somebody and love them for who they are and not wish for them to be different, or need them to be different.’”  And because we are, like the song the narrator plays in a jukebox,  just dust in the wind and “we’re all just passing through,” perhaps we should try to find beauty where we can:  “’dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.’”

A re-reading of this book would probably be useful and revelatory, but it didn’t hold my interest sufficiently to entice me to read it again, at least not yet.