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Do real private detectives read detective novels? Do police officers read crime fiction? I wonder because, as a practicing attorney, I don’t usually read novels dealing with lawyers. Even when written by attorneys, story-telling seems to require shortcuts. Perhaps unnoticed by the average reader, those shortcuts can leave me incredulous, even infuriated. Although David Schmahmann’s Nibble & Kuhn also takes a few shortcuts, it doesn’t raise my ire as much because it’s clearly an irony-tinged look inside a large law firm.
 While John Grisham’s novels are the equivalent of a big studio, blockbuster thriller, Nibble & Kuhn is more akin to an indie, light romantic comedy. It is told by Derek Dover, who is up for partnership in the Boston law firm Nibble & Kuhn. Reminiscent of Jonathan Harr’s nonfiction work, A Civil Action, one of the managing partners assigns him a lawsuit against a huge corporation for allegedly polluting a neighborhood swimming hole and causing cancer in seven children. Previously handled by a partner who is becoming a judge, Dover quickly learns the thousands and thousands of dollars in time and expenses invested in the case are nearly useless.
Personal and professional dilemmas form another storyline — Dover’s relationship with Maria Parma, a new associate in the firm. Although Parma tells Dover she is engaged to someone in Spain, he arranges for her to be assigned to assist with the case. While the backstory of her engagement is a stretch, the romance and the issues it creates have a real world touch. All this takes place as the law firm is “rebranding” itself (with the unfortunate name “Nibbles’) and completing an extravagant office building. This, of course, comes amidst a crumbling economy that leads many law firms to lay off staff and attorneys.
The book has other authentic rings. Dover is not a crusader, just a young litigation attorney who wants to do good and professional work. Yet as Schmahmann, himself a lawyer, points out, for many large metropolitan law firms, “courtrooms are mythic and abstract places. Nibble lawyers do not try cases. Nibble lawyers threaten to try cases, and then settle.” Dover can’t grasp why he’s been saddled with an important case that seemingly can’t be won — or settled. And although perhaps a bit stereotyped, the managing partners are idiosyncratic, haughty and increasingly distant from the regular practice of law, treating the firm more as “a money making machine with practicing law as a pretext.” Day-to-day authority tends to fall to non-lawyer administrators and the firm often seems run via autocratic memos.
Where Nibble & Kuhn lacks some authenticity is in and around the courtroom. For example, it is inconceivable a judge would learn at a Friday hearing, his first in a case, that he’s been assigned a month-long “toxic tort” trial that will begin Monday. Only in novels could the lawyers in such a case pick a jury and make opening statements in roughly two and a half hours.
Why does story-telling take precedence? As Dover observes, “Lawsuits, despite what one might see on television, aren’t that interesting.” That is especially true of pretrial conferences and jury selection. Still, the most important courtroom scene is the most unbelievable — and intentionally so. Not only is it essential to the novel’s heart and soul, you never see coming and it can’t help but prompt a huge grin, if not outright laughter.
Nibble & Kuhn won’t cause me to abandon my hesitancy to read legal novels. Yet at least Schmahmann lets us know his tongue is often firmly in cheek so that when he diverges from actual practice even those of us who notice can still chuckle at his look at litigation and law firm life.
There are some days when it is much harder to practice law than others.
David Schmahmann, Nibble & Kuhn
Ranging a bit far afield from the usual topics of this blog but dealing with a subject of professional interest, a couple recent items reinforced this country’s problem with immigration. It isn’t illegal immigrants — it’s the fact our immigration system is broken.
Our immigration law labyrinth is not only a factor in illegal immigration, it adversely affects our ability to bring the world’s “best and the brightest” to America. Just how big a problem the latter is requires a brief summary of some immigration basics.
What everyone calls a “green card” is the end result of the process to become a legal permanent resident (LPR) of the United States — an immigrant. As the name suggests, LPRs can live and work permanently in the U.S., with or without eventually taking the steps to become a citizen. Green cards fall into two broad classes — employment-based and family-based. Two frequently used employment-based routes are the EB-2 and the EB-3 visas. Not only do both normally require a U.S. employer offer the individual full-time, permanent employment, the employer must prove to the U.S. Department of Labor that U.S. workers have been recruited for the job and are unavailable. Roughly 90 percent of these visas have additional rather stringent requirements.
The EB-2 is limited to professionals with an advanced degree or persons of “exceptional ability” in the sciences, arts, or business. Thus, it is often used by doctors and scientists. Three-quarters of the EB-3 visas are reserved for professionals with bachelor’s degrees and “skilled workers,” those filling positions that require a minimum of two years of training and experience. This would include many computer professionals, software designers and health care occupations. Now it makes sense that we would want these types of workers in the U.S., particularly when the federal government says no American worker is adversely affected.
Here’s the rub. Under our current system, less than 100,000 of these visas are available annually, allocated by country of birth (not citizenship). That means some extremely long waits. According to Charles Kuck, the 2008-09 president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, nearly 53,000 people born in India and China have been approved but are still waiting for EB-2 green cards. Another 140,000 people are waiting for EB-3 visas. Neither figure includes roughly 150,000 applications already somewhere in the application process.
What’s that mean in real life? While admitting his calculations might be a bit rough, Kuck figures:
- A person born in India who starts the process for an EB-3 visa today will wait 15.8 years before a green card will be available.
- There will be a 4.1 year wait for a Chinese-born person who applies for an EB-2 visa today.
- The worldwide wait for an EB-3 visa for a person filing today is 8.1 years.
Kuck points out the consequences of this morass:
Every single [person approved but waiting for a visa] has a job offer, an employer, and a certification that either there are no qualified, willing and able US workers for the job, or that the individual is so good, we do not even have to test the labor market. We need these people. We want these people. How many do you think will now just give up and go home?
So what?, critics ask, we don’t need more of “them.” Well, look at what some of “them” have done. My friend Joel Rosenthal points out that one of Google’s co-founders is an immigrant. This year, the first six Nobel Prize winners were American citizens. Four were immigrants (winning the Medicine and Physics Prizes).
Our immigration system is broke. We need to fix it. If we don’t, how many future Nobel Prize winners and genuises in technology, medicine and science will we have kept from bringing their expertise to this country?
As we have in the past, we should embrace our immigrant roots and recognize that newcomers to our land are not part of the problem, they are part of the solution.
Archbishop Roger Mahony, “A Nation That Should Know Better“
True, Harry Nilsson’s Son of Schmilsson was released in the summer of 1972. But with the cover, on which Nilsson appears as Dracula, and the B-horror movie sound effects between the first and second tracks, it seems an appropriate topic for Halloween week — even though I value the album as a tremendous deconstruction of and homage to love songs.
 Son of Schmilsson came on the heels of Nilsson Schmilsson, a 1971 release that produced three hit singles, including the chart topping “Without You.” The title would suggest Son of Schmilsson is more of the same. You couldn’t be more wrong. Instead, Nilsson uses an opportunity created by commercial success to indulge himself and have fun.
The songs on the LP include the serious and the seriously loony. The album is replete with top-notch musical talent and songs ranging from rock to ballads to country twang. While the song “Spaceman” hit the Top 40 charts, the album’s bawdy nature attracted even more attention. Thus, you have Nilsson leading a choir of senior citizens on “I’d Rather Be Dead,” with a chorus built around “I’d rather be dead/Than wet my bed.”
Nilsson’s willingness to push boundaries turns the album into a splendid exploration of love songs. In the opening cut, “Take 54,” a recording artist bemoans the fact that “I sang my balls off for you baby” but still woke up alone. That is immediately followed by “Remember (Christmas),” a tender piano ballad. (Of course, the somewhat schizo approach to the album is seen on side two when Nilsson interrupts the beginning of “Remember” with a belch to lead in to “At My Front Door,” the only song on the LP he didn’t write and perhaps the most rocking one). “The Lottery Song” is also beautiful as Nilsson sings of a man who dreams of finding happiness with his girl in Vegas. The album closes with “The Most Beautiful World in the World,” a love song to planet Earth (“I love the way you wear your trees”) with plenty of orchestration — and some gargling.
Parody is at the heart of two tracks on the first side of the album that truly take us inside love songs. “You’re Breakin’ My Heart,” which closes that side, takes little more than three minutes to distill the essence of many love songs. It opens with “You’re breakin’ my heart/You’re tearin’ it apart/So fuck you.” The lyrics perhaps caused severe heart palpitations in the offices of record company execs. But if you’ve never experienced that exact feeling, you’ve lived a far too sheltered a life. The song recognizes reality in another way. By the end, that refrain becomes a plaintive “You’re breakin’ my heart/You’re tearin’ it apart/But I love you.” With 15 words, Nilsson sums up the emotions of a failing relationship.
“Joy” is country-based, complete with pedal steel guitar, and provides wonderful insight. Nilsson engages in wordplay with the narrator’s relationship with a girl named Joy, including a chorus that includes “Joy to the world/Was a beautiful girl/But to me Joy meant only sorrow.” But here is the song’s unassailable logic:
Now–if you haven’t got an answer
Then you haven’t got a question
And if you never had a question
Then you’d never have a problem
But if you never had a problem
Well, everyone would be happy
But if everyone was happy
There’d never be a love song
The most heart-wrenching love songs address the emotional impact of failed relationships. “Joy” astutely points out that we would never hear those songs if love left everybody happy.
Whether in spite or because of its humor and bawdiness, Son of Schmilsson actually went gold and reached number 12 on the charts, feats Nilsson would never again accomplish. The lack of future commercial success was due in part to drugs and drinking (he was John Lennon’s compatriot during Lennon’s 18-month “lost weekend”), as well as vocal chord and health issues. I’m just glad he wrote and sang his balls off on this album.
Tell her she’s beautiful
Roll the world over
And give her a kiss
And a feel
Harry Nilsson, “The Most Beautiful World in the World,” Son of Schmilsson
Sometimes a book leaves me puzzled. Sometimes that’s good. Sometimes that’s bad. Sometimes it’s both. Paul Auster’s latest novel, Invisible, falls in the latter category.
 Before explaining why, the basic background of the story is necessary. Invisible is the memoir, of sorts, of Adam Walker’s life in 1967 as an undergrad at Columbia University. Told during periods ranging from then until 2007 by different narrators, the spring, summer and fall of that year are recounted in four interconnected chapters. Each season ultimately involves some actual or claimed violation of criminal or moral standards, events that forever alter and mark not only Walker’s life but several others. All stem from the then 22-year-old Walker, who wants to be a poet, meeting a visiting professor of international politics at Columbia and the professor’s unusual but attractive girlfriend at a party.
The “bad” puzzles for me are unquestionably matters of personal preference. Auster is among those authors who engage in the post-modern tendency to leave it for the reader to determine what the story ultimately is or means. While I don’t need to be led by the hand or have a postscript explain a work to me, I often tend to prefer certainty over uncertainty. Yet even though we believe certain historical facts when we finish Invisible it is still not quite clear exactly what is true and what isn’t. In that way it is perhaps a contemplation of the meaning of truth or the sometimes thin line between it and fantasy. Perhaps Auster simply asks us to ponder how a chance meeting can set in motion a series of events that alter any number of lives forever. I’m not quite sure. Plainly, though, whether that is, in fact, “bad,” rests with each individual reader.
The novel, Auster’s fifteenth, also focuses somewhat significantly on sex or, as the book jacket puts it, “unbridled sexual hunger.” You can’t say it’s immaterial to the story and, in fact, might also be viewed as reflecting the sexual revolution of the time. I am far from prudish and don’t find the usage offensive. Still, Invisible is just one of a number of novels that leave me wondering why sex is such a recurring motif. Perhaps it is as simple as literature dealing with the fundamental emotions and motivations of human life. Again, though, it is this overall tendency, not just the usage in Invisible, that leaves me a bit puzzled.
The “good” puzzle pieces far offset the “bad” pieces. There is the way Auster structures the story. Not only do we have three narrators, the story is told in different voices — first person, second person and third person. Explaining just how and why Auster creates this approach might undercut some of its effectiveness and power. Suffice it to say that because the events are viewed at different times and through different prisms there comes a point, particularly with one plot line, where we directly encounter the question of what is truth.
In addition to the structure, there is Auster’s always impressive ability to tell a story. Invisible draws you in quickly and you’re the one who doesn’t really want to let go. Although you could arguably call this a type of thriller, Auster doesn’t generate page-turning by simply leaving the reader hanging at the end of each chapter. He does something far more difficult and rare. You keep turning pages because you’ve become absorbed in the story and the characters. When you get right down to it, isn’t that what anyone really wants from a novel?
Maybe I’m too antediluvian. Or perhaps Invisible or its lack of definitive resolution will puzzle you also. It’s worth the time to find out.
For the sad fact remains: there is far more poetry in the world than justice.
Paul Auster, Invisible
Worthwhile Reading in the Interweb Tubes
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It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.
Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), This Is Spinal Tap
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