On Page 1 of ''Ordinary
Then, in the third paragraph, Turow zooms in on the funeral director: '' 'Was David a veteran?' he asked. The undertaker was the cleanest-looking man I'd ever seen, with lacquered nails, shaped eyebrows, and a face so smooth I suspected electrolysis."
That quick sketch takes the reader from outside the scene to deep inside, intensely evoking the strangeness and the alienation from reality of such places. And it instantly establishes Turow as a nuanced observer of human beings and the landscapes of their personal dramas, including an instinct for conveying the essential details that turn a novel into a living organism.
''Ordinary Heroes" is a World War II novel, and as such is a departure for Turow, who's best known for his best-selling legal thrillers. But it is also the story of a son seeking to understand his late father. Its part-time narrator, Stewart, is a former newspaper reporter who puts his research skills to work after David dies and Stewart discovers, in his father's bedroom closet, a stack of returned letters from a fiancee named Grace who was unknown to Stewart. Even more upsetting is Grace's reference to David's court-martial in 1945.
Despite David's lifelong unwillingness to reveal himself to his son, Stewart cannot imagine his father of being guilty, or even appearing to be guilty, of treason. But, citing the wishes of his father, who was a military lawyer during the war, Stewart's mother refuses to explain.
Stewart then embarks on a private investigative journey, thinking he will write a book about his father. But his ambitious project is usurped (a nice reiteration of father-son conflict) when he finds a memoir that his father composed while incarcerated and realizes that the book has already been written. That memoir becomes the book-within-a-book, narrated by David himself -- a primary source if ever there was one.
