THE FINAL CASE

A bestselling author explores art, justice, and grief as he questions what makes a story true.

“Awhile back, I stopped writing fiction.” This is one of the first things the narrator has to say about himself. After a description of the (implausibly brief) existential crisis that followed the end of his fiction-writing career, he addresses the reader directly: “If that leaves you wondering about this book—wondering if I’m kidding, or playing a game, or if I’ve wandered into the margins of metafiction or the approximate terrain of autofiction—everything here is real.” This may look like reassurance, but it’s actually a warning. Using a young girl’s murder as an inciting incident, Guterson tests the reader’s understanding of story, truth, and how the two intersect. The narrator’s father, Royal, is an attorney approaching the end of his own career. When Royal agrees to defend a White woman accused of killing her Black adopted daughter, the narrator becomes intrigued by the case. Again and again, his father cautions him that the real justice system doesn’t function the way it does on TV, but then a judge delivers a speech that provides exactly the kind of moral satisfaction we want from crime shows. This speech serves as a bookend to an earlier passage in which the accused woman’s mother rants about all the ways in which White Christians are oppressed in contemporary America. The shape of this text—a single, uninterrupted paragraph spread over multiple pages—strains credulity, but its content is instantly recognizable to anyone who pays even scant attention to right-wing media. Guterson seems to be asking why righteously elegant oration seems realistic when it’s coming from the bench but an equally impassioned soliloquy delivered in the living room of a double-wide in rural Washington feels like a literary contrivance. The author subverts expectations over and over again. After the narrative begins to take the shape of a courtroom drama, the story shifts back to the personal concerns of the narrator—including a lot of thought and conversation about the craft of writing—for so long that it seems possible that the dead child has been forgotten. She has not. It’s just that real life seldom has an obvious beginning, middle, and end. The book closes with the narrator turning toward his wife in the dark while she whispers, “We can love people….What else is there?” This might feel like an easy out for a story in which hateful people and dumb mortality wield their power. Or it can feel like a gentle acknowledgement of our collective precarity.

Needfully discomfiting.