Law Firm Follies

By Evan Thomas

THE ASSOCIATES

by John Jay Osborn Jr.

Houghton Mifflin; 270pages; $8.95

Working as an associate at the Wall Street law firm of Bass and Marshall is a curious sort of servitude. The associates are liveried in Brooks Brothers suits, their glass-box sweatshop has Oriental rugs, and the minimum wage is $27,000 a year. If they slave night and day for eight years, they may ascend to partnership and gain the privilege of exploiting other associates. Along the way, their brains turn into stuffed briefcases, and their souls are lost to mean ambition.

A job with a firm like the fictional Bass and Marshall is the reward for successful grade grubbing at a good law school, which John Jay Osborn Jr. wrote about with wit and feeling in his first novel, The Paper Chase. Hart, the hero of that book, "learned to love the law," an ironic expression of Harvard Law School students. He also learned to hate the way law students stabbed each other to succeed at it. In Osborn's new expose. The Associates, Samuel Weston, fresh from Harvard Law School, shares those passions. In Weston's lofty view, work at Bass and Marshall is grinding, trivial and dehumanizing, especially when it interferes with Sam's love for another associate, Camilla Newman. The attraction, however, is a mystery. Ms. Newman is profane, nasty and thoroughly obsessed by her job. Her few excursions into sex make Last Tango in Paris seem tender. When she dumps Weston to take up with Lawrence, an associate who wants to make partner the way condemned men want to live, it is difficult to grant the hero any sympathy.

In isolated passages of The Associates, Osborn conveys a familiarity with soft-carpeted power and a fascination with contract law, the translation of human reliance into legal principles. But the officers of Bass and Marshall are little more than caricatures. Their eyeballs are forever bulging, and they communicate with associates chiefly by hissing. One partner fancies himself as a sea captain, and enters securities litigation with commands like "Blast them. Send them down in an instant with all hands on board." Cosmo Bass, the formidable autocrat who runs the firm, could have been another Kingsfield, the Paper Chase professor. Unfortunately, Weston never gets to do much more than eat lunch with the old boy and listen to him bombinate about what it was like to be an associate in the '20s (stiff collars, no air conditioning, low pay).

Osborn's real strength is not that of a novelist, but as an entertainer. In one very funny set piece. Littlefield, an associate fond of drugs and arcane legal philosophy, writes a brief for a crucial case that cites Cicero instead of legal precedents. He is fired by Lynch, a partner driven mad by the weight of his famous legal ancestors. The next morning, it is Lynch's turn to perform. In court to argue the case, he opens his mouth, but no words come out, leaving Weston to wonder if the poor wretch is going to make a silent oral argument before the U.S. Court of Appeals.

Such scenes may not occur in Wall Street law firms, but they might make a movie, perhaps even a high-class, low-Nielsen TV show. It is a pity that Osborn did not find enough that is human about major league law firms to make his book something more. --Evan Thomas

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.