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The associates: A novel
Vintage TV tie-in paperback
270 pages, Hardcover
First published March 5, 1979
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48 people want to read
About the author
John Jay Osborn Jr.
5 books48 followersJohn Jay Osborn, Jr. is the author of the bestselling novel, The Paper Chase, a fictional account of one Harvard Law School student's battles with the imperious Professor Charles Kingsfield. The book was made into a movie starring John Houseman and Timothy Bottoms. Houseman won an Oscar for his performance as contracts professor Kingsfield. The Paper Chase also became a television series. Osborn wrote several of the scripts. Osborn's other books include The Associates, The Man Who Owned New York, and The Only Thing I've Done Wrong.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 8, 2023
2023 reads, #62. The world recently saw the passing of John Jay Osborn, Jr., an author who's largely been forgotten by now but who played an outsized role in my own maturation as a fan of literary fiction (but for more, see my review of his 1971 debut, the law school character drama The Paper Chase). 1979's The Associates is the second book of the so-called "Lawyer Trilogy" from his short career as a novelist (he was mostly a lawyer himself, and seems to have completely given up creative writing after 1981, except for one book about marriage he wrote right before his death), and I have to confess that I didn't care for it at all, and in fact struggled badly just to finish it in the first place.
The problem is twofold, the first and bigger of which is that, just like The Paper Chase, Osborn turns in a messy, shaggy, unconventional storyline here; but unlike The Paper Chase, where this messiness is charming when applied to a story about earnest 22-year-old college students in the middle of the countercultural era, here the problems are a lot less forgivable in a story from the pre-Reagan years about young practicing lawyers at their first actual jobs for a high-powered Wall Street firm, with a plot that simultaneously zooms all over the place and has nothing interesting in particular to actually say. And that leads us to the second major problem, which is that Osborn seems to have shot his conceptual wad so to speak with the first book, and so here turns in a pretty transparent attempt at replicating it; his meek everyman protagonist Weston is pretty much a carbon copy of The Paper Chase's protagonist Hart, while his freaky intellectual best friend Littlefield is a ripoff of the previous novel's Ford, his love interest Camilla pretty much a ripoff of the previous novel's Susan, the firm's mysterious facilities at Hudson Street serving the same purpose as the mythical "Red Files" kept under lock and key in The Paper Chase, etc. etc.
This is not necessarily terrible in and of itself, but the bigger problem here is that the things he's ripping off from his previous novel are by and large the worst elements of that book, meaning that he's self-stealing the stuff he actually should've left behind in his growing maturation as a creative writer, and ignoring the things he should've done more of. Of particular concern is Osborn's bizarre, now offensive attitudes about "progressive" women of the 1970s; in both these books, the love interests are manipulative, unpleasant shrews, who behave with the kind of inexplicable randomness of a space alien, while the male counterpart in both books is the kind of suit-and-tie Mid-Century Modernist conservative who declares his love for the woman literally the very first time he meets them, and then immediately starts obsessively insisting that they get married after one date and buy a nice little two-bedroom ranch house in Ossining.
This would've already come off as strange and offputting even in the '70s when these books were originally published; but now 50 years later, Osborn's clear xenophobia for any woman who acts independently is actively offensive, theoretically forgivable in The Paper Chase because of the circumstances (there the protagonist is 22, and the love interest is the daughter of the professor he has an obsession with), but much less forgivable here where the characters are now all supposed to be in their late twenties, actually out and working in the real world, and with the love interest here simply being a random co-worker at the high-pressure firm where he works. That makes it easy to see why Osborn's career as a novelist really floundered after the accidental success of his literary debut (which, to be clear, was the big success it was because it got turned into an Oscar-winning movie that's way better than the original book), and I have to confess that I'm now kind of dreading the third book in the trilogy, 1981's The Man Who Owned New York (which I'll be reading anyway, because I literally special-ordered this long out-of-print title from Amazon). As always, I'll let you know in a few weeks what I thought of that one as well.
The problem is twofold, the first and bigger of which is that, just like The Paper Chase, Osborn turns in a messy, shaggy, unconventional storyline here; but unlike The Paper Chase, where this messiness is charming when applied to a story about earnest 22-year-old college students in the middle of the countercultural era, here the problems are a lot less forgivable in a story from the pre-Reagan years about young practicing lawyers at their first actual jobs for a high-powered Wall Street firm, with a plot that simultaneously zooms all over the place and has nothing interesting in particular to actually say. And that leads us to the second major problem, which is that Osborn seems to have shot his conceptual wad so to speak with the first book, and so here turns in a pretty transparent attempt at replicating it; his meek everyman protagonist Weston is pretty much a carbon copy of The Paper Chase's protagonist Hart, while his freaky intellectual best friend Littlefield is a ripoff of the previous novel's Ford, his love interest Camilla pretty much a ripoff of the previous novel's Susan, the firm's mysterious facilities at Hudson Street serving the same purpose as the mythical "Red Files" kept under lock and key in The Paper Chase, etc. etc.
This is not necessarily terrible in and of itself, but the bigger problem here is that the things he's ripping off from his previous novel are by and large the worst elements of that book, meaning that he's self-stealing the stuff he actually should've left behind in his growing maturation as a creative writer, and ignoring the things he should've done more of. Of particular concern is Osborn's bizarre, now offensive attitudes about "progressive" women of the 1970s; in both these books, the love interests are manipulative, unpleasant shrews, who behave with the kind of inexplicable randomness of a space alien, while the male counterpart in both books is the kind of suit-and-tie Mid-Century Modernist conservative who declares his love for the woman literally the very first time he meets them, and then immediately starts obsessively insisting that they get married after one date and buy a nice little two-bedroom ranch house in Ossining.
This would've already come off as strange and offputting even in the '70s when these books were originally published; but now 50 years later, Osborn's clear xenophobia for any woman who acts independently is actively offensive, theoretically forgivable in The Paper Chase because of the circumstances (there the protagonist is 22, and the love interest is the daughter of the professor he has an obsession with), but much less forgivable here where the characters are now all supposed to be in their late twenties, actually out and working in the real world, and with the love interest here simply being a random co-worker at the high-pressure firm where he works. That makes it easy to see why Osborn's career as a novelist really floundered after the accidental success of his literary debut (which, to be clear, was the big success it was because it got turned into an Oscar-winning movie that's way better than the original book), and I have to confess that I'm now kind of dreading the third book in the trilogy, 1981's The Man Who Owned New York (which I'll be reading anyway, because I literally special-ordered this long out-of-print title from Amazon). As always, I'll let you know in a few weeks what I thought of that one as well.
October 3, 2024
But five stars if you’re (a) a young lawyer, (b) into ‘70s NYC nostalgia, or (c) a Paper Chase diehard.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews