Rights

by Lawrence Goldstone

When Fruitful Willis, after years of scraping out a meager living as a bum, discovers that he has been granted a more dignified status as a member of the ‘homeless,’ he stakes a claim on the sidewalk in front of Murray Plotkin’s delicatessen. Murray’s heavy-handed attempts to remove the newly-appointed Willis result in Fruitful engaging the services of an activist lawyer, Herbert Whiffet, to protect his rights.
 
At roughly the same time, Lawanda de Bourbon, the stunning 18-year-old consort of a ruthless gang leader (and everyone else), is gunned down during a drug sweep wearing only a flimsy negligee. James Rodriguez, the rookie patrolman responsible for the shooting, claims she had a gun in her hand, however no gun was found at the scene. The very same Herbert Whiffet is then hired by the de Bourbon family to assure that Lawanda’s rights are protected, albeit post-mortem.
 
Whiffet seizes upon each of these cases as a vehicle to further the cause, to say nothing of the enhancement of his own status as a champion of his people. Caught in the resulting whirlwind are Cornelia Pembroke, the beautiful star reporter for a local television station, Renee Lieberman-Smith, a crusading assistant district attorney, the Reverend Leotis Chestnut, a veteran of the civil rights movement, and, most importantly, Clarissa Taylor, a single working mother of three who discovers it is her rights and those of her children which are most desperately in need of protection.
 
Rights is a scathing, hilarious send-up of big-city politics and current social mores which casts an equally unsparing eye on black activists, white liberals, media sensationalists, political opportunists, and various others responsible for creating a society where the wrong people inevitably become the victims.

268 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1992

About the author

Lawrence Goldstone is the author of fourteen books of both fiction and non-fiction. Six of those books were co-authored with his wife, Nancy, but they now write separately to save what is left of their dishes.
Goldstone's articles, reviews, and opinion pieces have appeared in, among other publications, the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, Hartford Courant, and Berkshire Eagle. He has also written for a number of magazines that have gone bust, although he denies any cause and effect.
His first novel, Rights, won a New American Writing Award but he now cringes at its awkward prose. (Anatomy of Deception and The Astronomer are much better.)
Despite a seemingly incurable tendency to say what's on his mind (thus mortifying Nancy), Goldstone has been widely interviewed on both radio and television, with appearances on, among others, "Fresh Air" (NPR), "To the Best of Our Knowledge" (NPR), "The Faith Middleton Show" (NPR), "Tavis Smiley" (PBS), and Leonard Lopate (WNYC). His work has also been profiled in The New York Times, The Toronto Star, numerous regional newspapers, Salon, and Slate.
Goldstone holds a PhD in American Constitutional Studies from the New School. His friends thus call him DrG, although he can barely touch the rim. (Sigh. Can't make a layup anymore either.) He and his beloved bride founded and ran an innovative series of parent-child book groups, which they documented in Deconstructing Penguins. He has also been a teacher, lecturer, senior member of a Wall Street trading firm, taxi driver, actor, quiz show contestant, and policy analyst at the Hudson Institute.
He is a unerring stock picker. Everything he buys instantly goes down.