Lawyer files scathing satire

Clayton Moore, Special to the News

Friday, July 28, 2006

John Grisham fans can stop reading right now. But for anyone else looking for a fresh voice in the legal-thriller category, here's a heads up: Legal junkie Jeremy Blachman, a Harvard Law School graduate, skewers his profession with slash-and-burn ferocity in his blog-based first novel, Anonymous Lawyer.

By injecting his protagonist with an incendiary, over-the-top malice, the author has created a monster worthy of the digital age, letting him loose on an unsuspecting public. While its degree of malevolence might cause gentler readers some undue dismay, the lunatic comedy that ensues is undeniably funny.

This caustic, cautionary tale sheds light on the rise and plummet of an unnamed hiring partner at one of the world's most prestigious law firms. His unorthodox downfall is presented through a staccato burst of online entries. Our maniacal narrator exposes not only the miserable realities of day-to-day life at the top - inhuman hours and rabid power plays, to say the least - but he also confesses his many, many sins.

To break up Anonymous' ferocious missives, Blachman also lets us peek at e-mails between the partner and a host of humanizing characters, including a well-meaning niece who's completing law school herself and a laid-back associate-slash-musician who earns the lawyer's grudging respect.

I was troubled at first by the book's derivative nature, especially since blog-based books are flooding the market these days. I confess I don't much like lawyers or blogs, both of which can be self-centered, self-serving mechanisms in the wrong hands, but Anonymous Lawyer won me over, for several reasons.

First of all, this is a real novel; it's merely disguised in a form to which modern and post-modern readers can relate. Like the best blogs, it tells one person's story with compelling detail and like the best books, its plot keeps moving at all times. There's little actual litigation here to bore readers but plenty of office politics to rival the most satiric television dramas.

Our unnamed narrator has a host of schemes under way, most of which involve undermining his rival, whom he bluntly calls The Jerk, in their bitter competition to become the next chairman of the firm. He obsesses over every detail of their profoundly unhealthy working relationship, right down to the size of their desks, which he measures out with paper clips during midnight raids. Meanwhile, Anonymous is also baby sitting a host of odd summer associates, keeping them busy with farcically menial tasks well below their abilities and hosting bizarre social events for the beleaguered law students.

Secondly, the unique delivery of this confessional narrative keeps readers guessing. Anonymous Lawyer's sketchy, anonymous blog allows this consummate professional to let his hair down, so to speak, and let his freak flag fly. It's hard to tell if Anonymous is really as sadistic as he seems or if he's merely sublimating all his pent-up frustrations by channeling them somewhere that won't hurt him personally. But egotistical entries like this one don't help:

"There are a lot of things I can't control. As you get older, you can't control your body. My shoulder hurts from throwing a pair of scissors at my secretary last week. . .My foot hurts from kicking a homeless man who was lingering around my car in the parking lot. I think he was homeless. He might have been a paralegal. I'm not sure. It's not important. But in the office I have control. . .In my fiefdom, I'm the king."

He saves plenty of spite for other lawyers. Some are fairly harmless, such as the bland Tax Guy, or The Bombshell, both of whom come into play later in the book. But there are others who suffer far more undignified nom-de-plumes, like The Suck-Up, Lives With His Mom, and most wretchedly, The One Who Missed Her Child's Funeral.

There's a fine balance to be made in a construct like this one, where the reader's insights are restricted. Tellingly, Blachman leaves little clues here and there. Where Anonymous' blog entries are venomous, his e-mails to his niece are far more tempered. He even admits to her that he exaggerates (read: lies) on his site from time to time, a fact that becomes crucial to the plot as more and more people both inside and outside the firm start to connect the dots. Finding out who's behind his vitriolic posts becomes a massive online game for the country's legal community, a scenario that played itself out in real life when Blachman was working out the kinks online at anonymouslawyer.blogspot.com.

Anonymous narrators are nothing new - books ranging from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man to Stephen White's recent Kill Me are all fine examples - but it's no less compelling to watch this one dig his own grave. It's to Blachman's credit that he's able to thread a credible plot through his damaged narrator's high-spirited but treacherous confessions. It's a deeply skewed worldview that blends the pressures of The Paper Chase and the absurdities of The Office, mixed with an unhealthy dose of obsessive ambition and a smart sense of satire. Laugh 'til it hurts.

Clayton Moore is a Colorado-based freelance writer. His work has appeared in Atomic Magazine, Dirty Linen, Bookslut and Paste Magazine.