Review: Defending Jacob

Defending Jacob by William Landay

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Jacob, a 14 year old kid living in an upscale Boston suburb, is the son of the assistant DA, Andy. From the outside, his life seems pretty normal; he's a little surly and a bit of an enigma to his parents, but, then, what teen isn't? So, when one of Jacob's classmates is brutally murdered in a nearby park, the accusation that their son is involved sends the Barber family into free fall.

This book, told through Andy's point of view, is a bit of a roller-coaster. The book starts off a little slow, but builds up steam as it goes along. Some may find the structure of the book frustrating or annoying--the narrator is speaking about the past and definitely drops hints about things that are to come "I thought blah blah blah, which seemed reasonable at the time; how could I have known what was to come?" sorts of things. I don't mind that, and actually found that it was an important part of the narrator's voice; it helped me understand the sort of person that Andy is and how he is processing the events of his past.

While the book is ostensibly about the murder of a young boy, and the case that built up around it, it becomes very clear that the story is really about relationships and family, and how those things define us. In particular, the history of violence in Jacob's family (that his grandfather and great-grandfather are murderers), and how his Andy's desire to break that history of violence leads to his blindness regarding what his son is capable of. I think the author did a great job creating the impression that Jacob really is an innocent, trapped by circumstance. It's the perfect use of an unreliable narrator--so convinced is Andy of Jacob's innocence (and blinded by his own desire to believe that they've escaped the "murder gene" and the history of violence) that he says to us, at several points, that his suspicions about Patz (the pedophile who was the other major suspect) were completely true... a statement we're left to question more and more as the novel moves along. Andy simply cannot even entertain the possibility that his son might be guilty, and it drives a wedge into the family and the community. Even beyond looking at Jacob's family and their relationship to violence, the book explores the relationships between professionals (Andy and his interactions with his career protégé/rival, Andy's relationship to the police he's worked so closely with over the years, etc), the family's relationships with other members of the community, and Jacob's relationships with his peers.

I think that one of the things that some readers may find frustrating with this book are that some of the choices being made or attitudes they express--particularly Andy--seem to be so clearly... bad. He makes several clearly bad decisions and seems to have so little grasp of who his son really is, that it can be frustrating, but, for me, that was part of what made the book more interesting. Andy's bad decisions don't seem bad to him. As a reader, you have to decide for yourself how much you side with Andy.

Not that the book wasn't without flaw; the book starts off kind of slow, and I found the final section a little too rushed--the book spends so much time on the rest of the trial and investigations, it felt strange to have such an important section whip by at such high speed, and to get so little insight into what was really going through Andy's head at that point. I'm not sure that making it longer would have helped, though, given the nature of the section.

I also felt like the ages of the characters didn't really fit with the descriptions; All the characters felt a little older than they were described as being. Jacob and his peers sounded more like late teenagers than middleschoolers, to me. Granted, I don't have teens of my own, and it's been literally two decades since I was there, so I assume times have changed. The bigger issues, for me, was that Andy ended up sounding much older than the 51 he was supposed to be. My own parents are about to turn 60 and they seem to have a better grasp of youth culture and technology than Andy seemed to. Did we really need to be told what a "mindfuck" is? Did it really not occur to Andy to look at his son's facebook page until a student mentions it? It does handwave at it by arguing that facebook was relatively new, but: 1. the story isn't helped by it (the ubiquity of facebook at this point makes it hard to imagine someone not thinking to look at it, especially since Andy was at least aware enough of facebook to have demanded that Jacob give him the password to it *before* the murder even happens) 2. by 2008 (when the story is set, I believe), facebook had been around for several years to the general public, and it was already pretty much everywhere for kids.

In addition, the book is *very* light on the crime procedural side; I was really expecting something a little different than what I got (although not a bad thing). Still, if you come into this book expecting it to be heavy on the crime, the criminology, or the psychology of the criminal part, you're probably not going to find what you're looking for. This is definitely more about the implosion of the family and the denial of the father than about the crime or the criminal.

Still, those flaws feel pretty minor, given the strength of the story and premise. This is definitely the perfect book for a book club, as Landay hits on some great themes (the limits and flaws of the justice system, crime/violence as hereditary, the importance of truth, the nature of relationships of all sorts, juvenile crime, etc) that are sure to elicit strong responses from readers. While it's not the best book I've read this year, I'd certainly recommend it to



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