‘Civil Action’ A Riveting Account Of The Power Of Big Corporations
How often do you read a book that makes you want to grab near-strangers and shout, “Stop! Go buy this right now. It’s terrific, the best thing I’ve read in ages!”
Not often.
Well, consider this that grab of your lapels, the tug on your shoulder bag, the hands waving in your face. I have been waiting almost two months to rave in print about “A Civil Action” by Jonathan Harr (Random House, $25), and my enthusiasm hasn’t ebbed as I waited for a galley to be replaced by the finished hardcover. This nonfiction account of a very long legal battle is page-turning, stay-up-way-past-the-hour-reason-tells-you-to-turn-off-the-lights stuff. I cannot say enough wonderful things about it.
The civil action of the title is a lawsuit filed by a group of families in Woburn, Mass., whose children died of leukemia. Because of their proximity to each other, and the unusually high number of deaths, they became convinced the illness had been caused by their drinking water, which at times was so vile the city closed down the two wells that serviced the neighborhood.
Ultimately, their case ends up in the hands of Jan Schlictmann, a tall, lanky plaintiff’s attorney with a taste for expensive suits and cars. Though warned away by his partners, Schlictmann devotes nine years of his life to battle W.R. Grace and Beatrice Foods, which own companies that for years dumped toxic waste out the back door of plants near the two Woburn wells.
Schlictmann is Harr’s vehicle for this massive story - he camped out in Schlictmann’s office, sat in on every decision, lived with the guy, practically - and he is a terrific vehicle: alternately infuriating, funny, goofy, maniacal, incredibly risky and single-minded. Though we don’t come to know the other lawyers and the judge in the case as intimately, they emerge as real people. What also emerges is a devastating picture of a legal system in which corporations routinely spend millions of dollars to bury problems. That Harr has condensed years and hundreds of thousands of documents into a page-turner is amazing.
At the risk of giving “A Civil Action” the kiss of death, I’d urge everyone who’s so hot for tort reform and gutting the Environmental Protection Agency to read this. Besides telling a great story, Harr illustrates just how powerless individuals would be if we killed all the lawyers and left business to its own devices.
“A Civil Action” is easily one of the best books of my year.
It has not been my only reading pleasure among the crop of books this fall, publishing’s biggest season.
Kaye Gibbons’ novels are set in the South and infused with a sensibility that seems somewhat foreign to me. Yet I never feel left out. Each book - “Sights Unseen” (Putnam, $19.95) is No. 5 - is a little jewel, completely engaging, often funny, presented in a voice that is absolutely believable. (If you haven’t read her, you must start with her debut, the breathtaking “Ellen Foster.”)
“Sights Unseen” is told from the vantage point of 12-year-old Hattie Barnes, whose life is shaped by her mother’s manic-depression, which comes to a climax, or nadir, during a six-week period in 1967. Gibbons’ opening lines are typically to the point: “Had I known my mother was being given electro-convulsive therapy while I was dressing for school on eight consecutive Monday mornings, I do not think I could have buttoned my blouses or tied my shoes or located my homework.”
Even when Gibbons is describing what are pretty desperate situations, they are never maudlin and often are rather funny. During the six weeks that ended in shock treatments, Mrs. Barnes, generally considered “eccentric” in her community (this is what strikes me as Southern), decides that Robert Kennedy, among a dozen other celebrities, is in love with her and is coming for dinner. In preparation, she consults with her butcher and then a Catholic family she has never met to find out what to serve her future lover.
It turns out Gibbons herself is manic, so she knows the territory. As with all of her books - oh, OK, the rest are “A Virtuous Woman,” “A Cure for Dreams” and “Charms for the Easy Life”; now you know what to ask for at the library - there is a sweetness to her work that is never cloying.
Now you will note a precipitous drop in my enthusiasm. This book is by a respected author, and it’s getting some good reviews.
Ann Beattie is one of those writers who seems to get deep respect from other writers and who invariably is cited for her eye for details.
Well, she is good at that. What she also is good at, judging from her latest novel, “Another You” (Alfred A. Knopf, $24), is people we don’t care about.
“Another You” is about Marshall, a literary professor at a small northeastern college who doesn’t have any friends because he is so emotionally uninvolved. He’s married to Sonja, a real estate agent having an affair with her boss, Tony. The story begins as Marshall gives a ride to a student he’s attracted to; Cheryl confides that a fellow professor, McCallum, has sexually abused her roommate, who’s now suicidal. Marshall feels he should help, somehow, and soon things are spiraling out of his control, lots of secrets are revealed and Marshall starts to face his life more squarely.
All of that is interspersed with letters written to Martine from an incredibly self-absorbed “M,” and it is only about halfway through the book that I finally figured out who those two are. (I don’t think I was particularly slow on the uptake here, but who knows?) I was alternately intrigued by the letters and annoyed by this trick.
In the end, the dead people are more interesting than the novel’s live but lifeless characters.