Chris Bohjalian | The Amateur | Doubleday (336 Pages)
The Amateur hits a rare sweet spot: literary novel, coming of age story and legal thriller. Bohjalian understands that getting the law right is only the beginning; the harder trick is making the law matter.
We know from the opening pages of Chris Bohjalian’s The Amateur who struck the fatal golf ball that killed a high school caddie. Yet somehow, this becomes an intriguing mystery. How did this freak, tragic accident even happen?
That deceptively simple question turns into a legal puzzle. Who is responsible for the damages: the net manufacturer, the country club or the unlucky eighteen-year-old golfer who hit the ball? And, crucially, did someone actually cut the leather target out of the driving range net?
It’s a rare treat to come across a thriller where joint and several liability is what keeps you turning pages, but here we are. The theory allows a plaintiff to seek recovery from multiple defendants whose conduct contributed to the same injury. In The Amateur, Kenny Foster’s family sues the country club, its golf pro, the manufacturer of the net and Mira Winston, the teenager who hit the ball. Each defendant has an incentive to prove that somebody else is more responsible.
Mira’s father, a corporate lawyer, contemplating what a trial would look like, puts it better:
“God, if the lawsuit goes to trial, it will be one gigantic Rubik’s Cube. There will be moments when the interests of the manufacturer and the club will be aligned, and moments when everyone will be throwing food at everyone else.”
It is a wonderfully lawyerly mystery.
Discovery changes what everyone knows, depositions change strategy and a damages claim forces the characters to put a price on a boy’s unlived future. In other words, tort law is a nail biter.
Before There Was a Case
This is not to give the impression that The Amateur is a courthouse drama. It is also a coming of age novel about Mira, narrating decades later, and the relationships that shaped her adolescence.
It’s August 1978 at a country club in Westchester when Mira Winston hits the fatal ball. She is a genuinely good golfer, good enough that college programs are recruiting her. But the accident isn’t where Mira’s story begins. When she was fifteen, she began a relationship with an older, married man in her suburban community. Later, after moving to New York, she has an affair with an older professor and novelist.
Looking back, Mira is much clearer about the imbalance than she could have been at the time:
“When you’re fifteen, there’s no such thing as consent.”
Bohjalian doesn’t romanticize what happened, even as Mira wrestles with the more complicated emotions she carried into adulthood. That question of responsibility runs alongside the legal one: What did people know? What should they have known? Who had the power to prevent harm? What does responsibility look like years later? Those are not, as it turns out, so different from the questions in a negligence case.
The Trial Was the Plot All Along
Bohjalian builds the second half of The Amateur on the actual architecture of a negligence claim. Mira’s lawyer reduces it to four words: Duty. Breach. Causation. Damages.
Once Bohjalian lays them out, it becomes hard not to read the rest of the novel through them. Did the country club set up the net in a place that put the caddie shack in harm’s way? Did the manufacturer sell a product unsuitable for the place where the club installed it? Was Kenny Foster’s death a foreseeable consequence of putting that net where caddies routinely walked? And what responsibility belongs to Mira, who did nothing more sinister that morning than hit a golf ball?
This is way more into golf than I ever planned on getting, but apparently the leather target hanging on the practice net was not beloved by the club’s serious golfers. It interfered with the way they wanted to use the net, which made its disappearance more than a stray detail. Who removed it, and whether doing so compromised the net’s structural integrity, becomes another question of responsibility. It also raises the possibility that what looked like a terrible accident may carry consequences beyond a fight over damages. Criminal charges loom.
The lawsuit makes adversaries of everyone. The club says the manufacturer supplied an unsafe product. The manufacturer says the club installed the net in a reckless location and failed to maintain it. Both have reason to emphasize Mira’s conduct; the Fosters have reason to keep every possible defendant in the case. And Mira is different from the other defendants in one crucial respect: “The country club and the net manufacturer had insurance companies that would pay their shares if they lost, but my family did not.”
As the lawyers begin digging, seemingly settled facts become considerably less settled. That is where Bohjalian is particularly good. Depositions and discovery aren’t pauses in the story while everyone gets the necessary legal business out of the way; they change the story. Something said casually can mean one thing when it happens and something entirely different when a lawyer puts it in front of a witness.
Joint and several liability does the same thing on a larger scale. It ensures that no defendant is ever entirely on anyone else’s side. Alliances shift according to the question being asked and the blame being assigned; everyone is simultaneously defending themselves and building a case against somebody else. The Rubik’s Cube keeps turning. And just when the contours of the civil case seem clear, the stakes change again.
What Is a Life Worth?
Then comes damages. Kenny’s family sues for $3 million, an enormous amount of money in 1979, arguing in part that they have suffered a “loss of consortium” with their son and brother that would last for the rest of their lives. On paper, damages is just the fourth element. Here, it becomes the most painful.
Mira remembers her mother saying she never wanted to know the eventual settlement figure because she didn’t want to know the fiscal value of a human life. Her father is blunter:
“There’s no way they’ll get anywhere near three million bucks for Kenny Foster. He was just a kid. There’s absolutely no way to gauge what kind of earning power he would ever have had.”
Which is both awful and precisely the problem. How do you put a number on a teenager whose future hasn’t happened yet? Kenny was a transplant from Miami with a secret passion for disco, a fellow AP History student of Mira’s and a good golfer himself, with real promise as a caddie because he understood the game from the inside. He was sitting outside the caddie shack reading a book when Mira’s ball came through the net. None of that answers the question; the law nevertheless requires an answer.
And the question gets tangled up with class. Mira understands exactly the story that can be told about her: “Spoiled kid versus the memory of Horatio Alger.”
The courtroom turns the two teenagers into competing narratives before anyone begins calculating dollars. Bohjalian understands something trial lawyers know. Jurors don’t receive facts in a vacuum; they receive stories about people. Rich girl. Poor boy. Reckless teenager. Promising student. Grieving family.
Duty. Breach. Causation. Damages. That last word has to contain a human life.
The Landing
Endings are hard, and twist endings are harder still. Bohjalian does. I won’t give away the final reveal except to say that it doesn’t feel like a gotcha. The clues have been planted carefully enough that once you know what happened, earlier scenes rearrange themselves around the new information. The legal mystery and Mira’s much longer reckoning with her adolescence suddenly belong to the same story.
Bohjalian’s deftness in weaving all of this together perhaps shouldn’t be surprising. He is the author of more than two dozen novels, including The Flight Attendant, which was adapted into an HBO Max series. He knows his way around both character and suspense. Here, neither has to make room for the law. The law gives him more of both.
One final note. In the acknowledgments, Bohjalian thanks attorney Celeste Laramie for teaching him how the lawyers on every side of the case might actually proceed.
That’s becoming one of my favorite tells. When an author thanks a lawyer by name, I pay attention. Increasingly, it’s a sign the legal details won’t simply sound convincing; they’ll matter.
The Fine Print: Thanks to Doubleday and NetGalley for the ARC.
“The Judicial Junkie really gets it. [T] his is why we do our homework, and why I had to get the law right for THE AMATEUR. I appreciate this essay a ton.”
— Chris Bonjalian, The Amateur
— Chris Bonjalian, The Amateur