I started "Lawyer Boy: A Case Study on Growing Up" about two weeks
ago, but much like my law school reading assignments, I didn't finish
it until the night before my review was due.
It's not that Lax is a bad writer; in fact there were several passages that showed real promise of a comedy writing future. It was more that reading his book was like reading for law school, interesting parts here and there, but the rest skim-inducing at best, sleep-inducing at worst.
An example — Lax's liberal use of footnotes. I hate footnotes in legal writing; they tend to have the most incomprehensible and irrelevant junk in them. And I was once told that if something is not important enough to include in the text, it should be left out. I'll admit to not having read a single one of the footnotes, and I don't believe I lost much from it. In fact, skipping the footnotes is what helped me to finish the last 240 pages of Lax's book in just a few hours.
But it wasn't just ignoring the footnotes that got me through this book so quickly — it was Lax's lengthy and numerous descriptions of legal concepts and cases. The moment a scene changed to class or studying (and that happened as often as one would expect of a law student), I knew I'd find a page or two of the useless 1L legal musings I didn't want to hear in my first-year classes, and I certainly didn't want to read in my spare time. Lax, in writing his memoir, repeatedly commits the cardinal sin of law studentdom — he talks about the law too much.
Certainly there were other interesting topics Lax could have developed more fully — but were just touched upon. The apparent lack of respect for the honor code among his fellow classmates, the utter douchebaggery of several of his professors, and the complete apathy of the administration in the face of it were among them.
But despite my frequent page skimming, I laughed out loud at several anecdotes. (Lax's first office hour visit with the aforementioned douchey legal writing professor was delightfully written and deliciously hilarious.)
Still, I found this chronicle of his first year at DePaul law school in Chicago very much like most books on the subject. Almost every student (with the exception of the author, of course) is a jerk, socially awkward, or both. Lax, a free spirit and amateur magician (at least this part was original), was forced to attend law school by his well-meaning family. (His father, a successful Michigan tax lawyer, didn't consider magic a viable career path.) For Lax, law school made having a social life impossible. I can't personally relate to this, but I sympathize.
And I did find myself sympathizing with Lax. He was a regular guy surrounded by absolutely horrible people. But the characters were almost too horrible to believe at times. And despite being surrounded by them for months, in the end Lax claims to have remained unchanged — essentially an awesome student and an awesome human being. (Incidentally, the kind of human being who, when an elderly man falls from an exercise machine, wonders about liability of the exercise machine company after making sure the man is OK.)
Though it's marketed to the law student and pre-law student crowd, this book may be better suited to a lay audience. As a current law student, I enjoyed the parts of the book that rang true of my experience, but those parts were few and far between. More often, I was annoyed by what I saw as exaggerations and bored by the retread of the same ideas I could find in any 1L student blog.
I see the comedic potential in this first-time author, and perhaps if he waited a little longer to write his memoir, cut his law school experience to a few chapters, and spent more time developing his writing skills, he'd be the next David Sedaris.
"Lawyer Boy" is an entertaining read — but only if you ignore about a third of it.
Comments