Common Law Story
ABRAMS, ELLIOTT
Common Law Story The Paper Chase By John Jay Osborn Jr. Houghton Mifflin. 181 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by Elliott Abrams Student, Harvard Law School SINCE THIS book concerns a Harvard law...
...That Love Story is more effectively written than The Paper Chase is in one sense a tribute to Harvard Law, where students are taught to write simple declarative sentences...
...his character portrayals render certain types faithfully, yet are strangely limited...
...The author of this first novel, John Jay Osborn Jr., is a recent graduate who has mastered the art...
...Reviewed by Elliott Abrams Student, Harvard Law School SINCE THIS book concerns a Harvard law student—his life, his work and his girl—it inevitably invites comparison with that modern masterpiece of the genre, Love Story...
...Since Harvard Law School, especially its faculty, is quite well integrated ethnically, this struck me as rather odd...
...His pared-down style will no doubt enable him to produce excellent legal briefs, but in a novel it seems a bit flat...
...In fact, except for its passing (and nonexploitative) mention of drugs and sex, the book might as well have been about the Class of '51—or, in one respect, the Class of 1871—as the Class of 1971...
...The past few years, for example, have seen intense discussion among law students about the political and social role played by lawyers and the law, yet none of this appears anywhere in The Paper Chase...
...By page 100, the reader thirsts for a dependent clause, an emotive adjective, a convoluted paragraph...
...Obviously determined to avoid soap opera, Osborn also fails to develop sufficient dramatic tension to sustain the reader's interest...
...And most law students anywhere would surely protest that their lives, at least intellectually, are considerably more lively and varied than can be gathered from the people who fill this book...
...Love Story merely used Cambridge as a setting for its melodramatic plot...
...Osborn's descriptions, particularly the classroom scenes, are generally accurate, if incomplete...
...The differences between the two novels, however, far outweigh their similarities: The Paper Chase is primarily an effort to convey what it is like to live and study at the Law School, limiting its potential audience...
...Inexplicably, Osborn's Harvard does not seem to admit Jews or other minorities: The professor is Kingsfield, and the main characters have names like Hart, Ford and Toombs...
Vol. 54 • September 1971 • No. 18
