CLOSING ARGUMENT?

By ELIZABETH GLEICK

It is perhaps a measure of the sorry state of what passes for bookworthy news these days--or the sign of a publisher desperate to protect a $4.2 million investment--that the big newsbreak that will be trumpeted out of Without a Doubt (Viking; $25.95), Marcia Clark's long-awaited memoir of the O.J. Simpson trial, is that the former prosecutor was raped at the age of 17. This highly personal detail, which can be found on four pages in the middle of the nearly 500-page volume, is sure to surface during the tearful interview with Barbara Walters, bob up again with Oprah and then again ad nauseam.

Clark is, at the very least, a victim of lousy timing. In the race to get out books on the Simpson case, she only barely made it to the track. (The book's official publication date is not until May 9, but on Saturday TIME obtained one of the first copies to reach stores.) Which Simpson principals haven't we heard from yet? Only Denise Brown and, perish the thought, Simpson's children, when they come of age. Currently competing for last place is former O.J. girlfriend Paula Barbieri, who only last January signed a reported $3 million deal. While the public's appetite for books on the case has been ravenous beyond publishers' dreams, Viking must be a little concerned that the end is nigh. Two months ago, the publisher announced that it was halving its planned 1 million-copy first printing. And now it must promote the heck out of a book that has little in the way of illuminating information.

This is not to minimize the trauma Clark says she underwent as a teenager, or the potency of a painful memory that she says resurfaced only when she tried to prosecute her very first rape case, or the greater good done when rape victims anywhere find the courage to break their silence. And let no one ever forget that Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were also the victims of a crime that, in all likelihood, had more than a little to do with sexual violence. But in feeding the insatiable publicity maw, Clark has been forced to devalue her own life story.

I wanted badly to like this book. For one thing, as life stories of people thrust into the spotlight go, Clark's is an interesting one, full of hard knocks and two tough marriages and professional success and a climactic trial by fire. During the Simpson case, some of the seamier details about her tempestuous relationship with her first husband Gaby, a professional backgammon player, surfaced in the tabloids. Clark explains how hard this hit her: "I was a survivor. I had surmounted my personal difficulties through acts that took considerable initiative and will. In the summer of 1994, I was not Marcia Kleks, the gambler's girlfriend. I was a lawyer--an intelligent and accomplished one, at that. I was a damned good mother. And everything admirable that I'd accomplished seemed threatened by this disturbing and unsolicited celebrity."

And Clark deserves sympathy. She was the underdog in a trial full of pit bulls: her appearance endlessly scrutinized by the sexist media, her jobs as a single mother and public servant tough ones, her midtrial custody battle an unimaginable burden far removed from the experiences of the Johnnie Cochrans and Robert Shapiros of this world. But it does not help that Clark spends a lot of time airing these very complaints. She may be right, but she is not telling us something we did not already know.

What she has on her side is a top-notch co-author, Teresa Carpenter, who is a Pulitzer-prizewinning journalist and the author of the riveting true-crime tale Missing Beauty. So while Without a Doubt has little to offer for the history books, it is well written, sometimes moving and occasionally amusing. At one point, Judge Lance Ito is compared with Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now: "increasingly cryptic and vain." And the anecdotes about fellow prosecutor Christopher Darden reveal a sweet rapport and a complex relationship. (As for the $64,000 question, Clark writes, tough-guy style, "The question is irrelevant. Fact of the matter is, Chris Darden and I were closer than lovers.")

When the trial ended, Clark confesses, she fell into a "malaise," and who can blame her? She lost what she thought was a winnable case, and, as she puts it, "My old life was gone." She acknowledges that she did not want to write Without a Doubt but that the money she received to do so will at last allow her to be a "soccer mom." Fair enough. But in a book that offers up an assortment of intimate details, it is hard not to feel that the real Marcia Clark is still hidden.