A Civil Action.

Jonathan Harr Random House, #25, 500 pp.

In A Civil Action, Jonathan Harr has written a gripping and engrossing book that reads like a novel, but commands attention in the way that only the very best nonfiction can. For two-and-a-half days, I read A Civil Action in every spare evening, hour, and minute. Not since Randy Shilts's tour-de-force, And the Band Played On, obliterated a long weekend six years ago has a work of nonfiction so compelled me to drop everything except the book itself. Reading Shilts's chronicle of the early years of the AIDS epidemic, I marveled at how the author managed to create a sense of suspense--when I knew perfectly well that the story would only grow worse and worse as the pages turned. Harr has accomplished a similar feat in telling the story of a highly publicized civil suit that pitted a group of citizens and their young personal injury lawyer against the two huge corporations (Beatrice and W. R. Grace) believed responsible for the contamination of the water in Woburn, Massachusetts, with toxic chemicals.

Even if you missed the story on "60 Minutes" years ago, you know within pages of beginning this book that the children die of leukemia; that the lawyer who takes on their families' cases against the corporations gives nearly a decade of his career for an $8-million out-of-court settlement with W. R. Grace (Beatrice was exonerated) that leaves him bankrupt and homeless; and that the corporations subsequently held accountable by the EPA for the contamination of Woburn's water avoid admitting responsibility. Harr creates suspense by adeptly combining two genres familiar from television and movies (courtroom drama and investigative journalism) with a psychological study that succeeds because it is so novelistic. With television producers so eager to knock off quickie reenactments of our crimes and scandals, using the furlongs of videotape filmed by news crews and camera-toting bystanders, the difference of A Civil Action is striking.

Harr writes his story as if he were inside the heads of his characters, rather than slavishly reproducing the TV news, video version of events that stands for "lifelike" in contemporary culture. The author is uniquely qualified to provide this insider's view of the personalities of the lawyers, the process of trying the case, and the hair-raising account of the effects of a judge's influence, because Jonathan Harr followed the case from before the start of the trial. And he followed it from the inside, attending the meetings and strategy sessions, inspecting the documents and financial records, and coming to know the victim and their lawyers over years of preparation and litigation. His research did not end when the case finally came to its conclusion, for then Harr began the in-depth interviewing that enables him to present an equally rich picture of the lawyers for the defense (the corporations), the antagonists of the piece. Though the book clearly takes the view that the industrial solvent trichlorethylene (TCE) in Woburn's water explains the cluster of leukemias, as well as a variety of other ailments suffered by residents of the neighborhood served by the poisoned wells, Harr's story focuses less on the tragic illnesses that instigate the investigation and the case, and more on the convoluted turns of the litigation itself.

Since we know, more or less, how the story turns out, Harr's success lies to a large degree in the wide range of characters presented in-depth, as a novelist relies on contrasting perspectives to complicate a plot. While never swerving in its sympathy for Jan Schlichtmann, the flashy, spendthrift young personal injury lawyer who takes on the Woburn case--the "black hole" no one else wants to touch--Harr's narrative also presents the strategies and motivations of Cheeseman and Facher, the lawyers defending Beatrice and W. R. Grace, with a fascinating account of their skills and weaknesses, their brilliant and dubious stratagems, and their manipulation of the judge and jury.

The suspense that makes A Civil Action such a page-turner lies in Harr's treatment of paired motifs: water and money. The book opens in 1986 with the repossession of jan Schlichtmann's Porsche. Too broke for a cab, the lawyer walks to work from his Beacon Hill condo. He rebuffs a homeless panhandler:

In a technical sense he was close to

being homeless himself. His condominium

association had just filed

a lawsuit against him for failing to

make a single maintenance payment

for the last six months. He was

also in arrears on his first, second,

and third mortgages. By the time

the jury had started deliberating,

after seventy-eight days of trial, all

the money was gone. "You're living

on vapor," [the firm's financial

manager] had told Schlichtmann

and his partners

Having alerted us to the financial ruin that will occur if the jury does not go Schlichtmann's way, Harr moves twenty years into the past, where the neighbors in East Woburn "talk among themselves about the water the way most other people would talk about the weather." Murky, smelly, and rust-colored, the water pumped between 1964 and 1979 from the wells serving East Woburn confutes our ideas of what water ought to be--to read of people chilling it, boiling it, mixing it with powdered flavorings in order to drink it is to enter, through homely details, a horror story.

If water is poison, Harr complicates our normal associations of the other substance flowing through the book: the lawyers' money. If the aim of the case is to extract enough compensation money from W. R. Grace and Beatrice to send a message echoing in every corporate boardroom across America, it is also to win fame and fortune for the lawyers. Since the profligate spending on appearances-hand-tailored "lucky" suits; fresh-cut flowers twice a week; sumptuous food that no one even eats--is matched by an equally lavish expenditure on medical studies, geological research, and a host of experts, money itself possesses a mixed character. Imbued with righteous indignation, and with greed, the money flows into "the black hole" of the Woburn case. As Harr chronicles the money spent on the lawsuit, we can almost see the water-table dropping.

Of course, those who possess the deepest reservoir of money work for the corporations, and Harr's book probes the relationship between corporate money and the judicial system. In a world governed by status, reputation, and old school ties, he suggests, victims represented by personal injury lawyers suffer the consequences of class prejudice In the end, we have to wonder if the impatient judge who presided over the case is merely obtuse, or blinded by deference. And, after all the money has been spent, the victims compensated, the debts contracted, and the bankruptcies declared, the EPA estimates that the reclamation of the contaminated aquifer will cost $69.4 million, and will take fifty years.

Despite its harrowing conclusion, A Civil Action is not an entirely depressing book to read, for Harr's study of morality and motives goes beyond indicting the corporations responsible for poisoning the water and exposing the individuals who covered up the dumping of toxic solvents and industrial wastes onto the vulnerable earth. In the best tradition of the novel of education, A Civil Action also celebrates the growth into self-knowledge of its reckless, ambitious, passionate, and compassionate hero.

Suzanne Keen teaches English at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.