(Not A) Book Review: Anonymous Lawyer

You may be wondering why I have not blogged about the forthcoming book Anonymous Lawyer, by Jeremy Blachman.  You may not be wondering -- you may have assumed that I haven't read it or that I'm not interested in it or that I don't think you would be interested in it.  If you assumed any of those things, you were mistaken. 

Here's why I haven't written about it.  I just counted, on my hard drive.  I have 12 drafts of the book saved there.  I've read it and edited it and read it again and had countless phone conversations and email exchanges with Jeremy when he was writing it.  If the book were a baby, I might be one of the midwives or nurses in the birthing room.  Or an aunt.  I feel pretty connected to the book.

So I can't review it as a book with any real integrity.  My dad read it, and liked it, and so did my housemate.  Neither of them are lawyers.  Both thought it was funny.  I can tell you it is funny, with confidence, not just because of that but because there were still moments after reading draft after draft when I would laugh out loud.  That's pretty rare for me, but the book has a lot of dark and spot on humor.

What I think is most interesting about the book is what Evan Schaeffer commented on in his review.  I think it's the first book that uses a blog as a narrative vehicle, and in doing so Jeremy explores a question I find pretty compelling -- how do we know who to trust?  What makes someone authentic, believeable, truthful?  Anonymous Lawyer, the character, has a distinctive narrative voice and in his trumped-up, over-the-top, angry and heirarchical persona he tells exaggerated stories.  But there's some kind of truth in that voice, and the blog has hit a vein.  People respond.  In the book, there's an active tension between the blog persona and the "real" persona (as evidenced by emails).  Sometimes AL is telling the "truth" on the blog, and sometimes in the emails, and sometimes he's lying in both.  The reader is faced with an unreliable narrator, and I find novels with unreliable narrators complex and interesting.

I don't think the strength of the book is its plot, or its depiction of law firm life.  It's not a memoir or a thriller or a highbrow "modern literature" book and its' not intended to be a truthful depiction of the life of a corporate law partner.  It's a funny, fast, novel, with a healthy dose of social commentary about heirarchy and where we find meaning.  It's about our self-image and how we construct it, and how we prop up that self-image when it falters.  And it's the first novel to explore, in a fairly interesting way, the way blogs do that.  Blogs are private, and public.  As a vehicle for an unreliable narrator the blog is very interesting, and I am not sure the cultural conversation about blogs has really started to embrace the complexity of the way people are exploring, sharing, and creating their identities online.  I think the book begins that conversation in an interesting way.

On a personal note, it's been a really neat experience for me to watch Jeremy construct the book.  I feel pretty certain that it will be a commercial success, and it's fun to have a friend going through the publishing process who can tell me about the ups and downs and victories and frustrations.   

Comments

[Bill Altreuter]

What of "Julie Julia"?

Of course, "Anonymous Lawyer" is fiction, so that's a distinction, but really are we talking about anything that is so different from a diary-- or a novel in the form of a diary?

There are things that are distinctive about the blog format, but the two principle ones that I can think of are hyperlinks and interactivity. Neither lends itself to the printed page, and I wonder if that means that blogging is really a dead letter when it comes to commercial writing.

[Jeremy]

Thanks for the post, Sherry. I didn't intend to comment, but Bill's question gets at something I've been thinking about for a longer piece I might pitch to some book blogs. I initially thought the same thing, that this was just a diary.

But what a weblog introduces that a diary doesn't have to contend with is the idea of private thought versus public thought. Diaries are private. A weblog isn’t quite private, because it’s being shared with the world -- but it isn’t quite public either, especially when it’s anonymous.

The persona that Anonymous Lawyer presents to his weblog readers is different from how he presents himself to the people he encounters in real life, but it’s also different from the private thoughts he has in his head.

A diary is a reliable narrator, a reliable indication of the voice inside the character’s head, but a blog isn't necessarily. The blog allows the character to present one image of himself, even if that’s not exactly true. And so part of the fun of the book is figuring out what the truth is, and how reliable the blog narrator turns out to be.

Maybe.

[ML]

I can't wait to read it!

[Kat]

Intriguing!

[a]

On the other hand, I'm not convinced that diaries are so reliable. True they a are an indication of a voice inside the character’s head, but that voice isn't always the whole picture either. Whether a diary or a blog, there is always that interesting tension between what is written, what is thought, and what the situational facts are.

What is most interesting to me right now is how intriguing this all is -- the interplay of stories and facts and reality, and how far we'll go to believe one perspective as the truth, or how much work it would take to piece everything together. I think many blog readers are okay taking the story at face value, and enjoying it. And other times, there's a huge desire - need, even? - to uncover the "real" person behind the story.

I also can't avoid connections to the greater social & political culture and how this sort of multi-faceted public/private storytelling is both played out and interpreted.

Good stuff.

You misspelled hierarchy.

[LD]

Evan Schaefer is not correct in saying AL is the first novel to use a blog as a narrative vehicle. Ana Marie Cox, formerly of Wonkette, published a novel in January called Dog Days which did just such a thing.
See: ://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/08/books/review/08buckley.html?ex=1154404800&en=a906fa364bb2dabd&ei=5070

[Donald]

I visited a very interesting site, they have a vast collection of books which have been categories and are presented to viewers in an easy-to-search format. You should check it out.

http://www.khichdee.com/category-catid-11-paraid-0.htm