Her new book is out, I skimmed it in Barnes & Noble, it doesn't mention me, and it's not especially funny, worth buying, or further discussing.

A commenter at PTN writes about my review:

[If] I read one more reviewer expressing grave doubts about whether a blog or series of emails could be a successful novel, I am going to die of mortification. Are people really unaware that the English novel was essentially BORN IN EPISTOLARY FORM?

I have no doubts about epistolary books. I had doubts about this particular blog turning into a book in particular because of the fact that the interest in the blog stemmed from the credulous belief that this was a real law partner speaking. It's the difference between J.T. LeRoy the memoirist and J.T. LeRoy the fictional character.

"Anonymous Lawyer" had no hope being about the potential insights into law firm life and had to be about the satire. I will say that my reaction to the satire is muted because, well, it may be new to law students, but I've seen it before. From the 1980s' "The Official Lawyers Handbook" to "The Rodent" (a pre-blog mid-1990s newsletter written by an anonymous law firm associate) to the somewhat more serious 1999 "Double Billing" to the short film I scripted and we showed at the law firm retreat where I put on a bow tie and played the managing partner seeking to improve profitability by charging associates a fee to look at the art on the walls.

It's not clear if this 2005 column is written by the same "Rodent", but note that it's the same theme as the Blachman book, and is funnier to boot, in part because it's much closer to the truth (and reflects the perspective an attorney who's dealt with several years of summer associates, rather than the perspective of a summer associate's understanding about how attorneys perceive summer associates). (Not that the Rodent is always funny: this column is a clunker, perhaps because, like Blachman's book, it's so over the top.)

I don't think Blachman stole the joke of the law firm hiding certain attorneys from the summer associates just because The Rodent made that joke before he did; law firms do hide certain attorneys from the summer associates. Blachman likely reinvented the wheel rather than cribbed from his predecessors. But, hey, good for Jeremy if he can sell old wine in new bottles.

Jeremy Blachman is living many a blogger's dream: he turned a popular blog into a book deal and the possibility of a writing career.

I'd previously expressed skepticism about the "Anonymous Lawyer" book, so Jeremy Blachman included me on the list of bloggers he offered advance copies to before its release on July 25.

This was a generous (and gutsy) offer that I accepted, and Jeremy seems like a nice guy, so it disappoints me that I can't report that I was wrong. The book doesn't work for me.

Blachman solves the blog-to-book translation by making the book a series of blog posts (and e-mails). And, like a lot of blogs, you can't believe everything you read.

Fair enough. The Anonymous Lawyer blog was supposedly written by a mythical hiring partner, who made acerbic observations about the hiring process. Some credulous people believed it was written by a real hiring partner, until Blachman outed himself as a Harvard Law student in a New York Times interview.

In the book, the blog is written by a real hiring partner, the character that Blachman created. But printing out the blog does not a book make, so Blachman interlaces a plot of sorts.

And this plot is the first fatal flaw of the book: now the Anonymous Lawyer has an aspiration, to become the managing partner at his law firm. But Blachman, who at least had some sense of how law firm summer programs work, has no sense of how internal law firm politics, or even internal law firm management, works. In the fictional world, the managing partner serves for life and is given dictatorial micromanaging powers by an executive committee, and elevation to managing partner is treated by the protagonist as the natural next step from being elevated to partner. Right down to the frustration the protagonist expresses over the decisions of the executive committee (which raises the question why he doesn't aspire to be a member of the executive committee, much less why the executive committee would grant such power in someone other than one of its own). And as Tung Yin notes, completely absent from the competition between Anonymous Lawyer and his rival is any sense of what competitive law firm partners really care about: shares and draw. (It's astonishing and entertaining how any complaint by a partner about a fellow partner will, within the first few minutes, note the inequity of their draw. No sense of that in this book.) Okay, a satire doesn't have to be realistic, but what precisely is this plotline satirizing? This main story (which I could never bring myself to care about) dominates the book, and its irrelevancy to reality and earnest lack of humor detracts from the elements that are satirical. One mourns the lost opportunity: anyone who has spent time in a law firm committee where micromanaging decisions are actually made has much funnier stories to tell about the battles over office assignments and furniture and coffee service.

The plot creates other problems combined with the blog-structure of the book. Because the book is told entirely from the files of the Anonymous Lawyer, we never see the other characters of the law firm except through his (not especially perceptive) eyes. And, as a result, the plot moves along almost entirely through outside events that just happen, and are never explained adequately. The plot is moved by at least eight deus ex machina events that do not arise organically out of characters' motivations, and the book is about Anonymous Lawyer's reactions (and only occasionally choices of which actions to take) to those events. A charitable interpretation is that Blachman is trying to show that even hiring partners are not in control of their legal careers, but I don't think so: this theme is never developed for anyone, and the book has very little to do with the law. Worse, at least four of those events require outside characters to act in a short-sightedly reckless manner entirely inconsistent with intelligent and experienced attorneys and executives: is a bank vice president really going to commit to paper a step-by-step guide to embezzlement? Is a law firm partner really going to write an e-mail explaining that he fired someone to punish them for reporting on a partner's wrongdoing? Yes, people do make reckless mistakes in real life; one need only point to my marriage and many other of my former relationships. But too many characters doom themselves by foolish actions without any explanation for why they were acting foolish other than to move the plot along in a way that it wouldn't if they hadn't acted foolishly.

And the Anonymous Lawyer protagonist is guilty of that, too. We're to believe that an ambitious attorney with eighteen years experience has started a personal blog that could endanger all he's worked for because... why? One understands why Jeremy Blachman or Melissa Lafsky anonymously blog about their legal careers directly or indirectly: they don't really want to be lawyers, and aren't afraid of the consequences of getting caught blogging. (A recent New York Times piece noted the irony that an intern could make substantially more money from a tell-all blog's book deal than from interning, but a senior law firm partner doesn't have that perverse incentive.) Other lawyers blog to get recognition in their field. Still others do it for attention, but this wouldn't be a problem for a hiring partner who can get associates and law students to genuflect before him. Why would a corporate litigator say such incriminating things in a blog? It's never explored, except in asides where the protagonist says he doesn't know why he's blogging. It's just assumed that Anonymous Lawyer (and numerous other lawyers who e-mail with Anonymous Lawyer) regularly commit to firm internal e-mail things that would be very embarrassing in a deposition, not to mention in the hands of the FBI.

There's a smaller subplot, a Blachman-like summer associate who is a favorite of Anonymous Lawyer (and who is the only character who is more than paper-thin) decides he really doesn't want to be a lawyer. But this doesn't work, either: we never see the progression, only hear it announced in an e-mail and a blog post. (And one suspects that it's a tacked-on response to this Amber Taylor post citing Blachman.) And we never see why the lawyers choose to be lawyers, either; it's not like the summer associates are treated so well that they're fooled or don't know what they're getting into, or that Anonymous Lawyer even pretends to put up a façade of what legal practice is like—summer associates are given dreary warehouse assignments reviewing documents and overnight busywork memos, precisely the kinds of assignments attorneys are forbidden to give summer associates in most law firms.

Blachman never decides who his main character really is. Is he a cynical excuse for a human being who cares about nothing other than money or power? Then why the sudden out-of-character blog posts of self-reflection exhibiting tremendous insecurity? And if the character really feels that everything he does is worthless and thinks his clients are all guilty, why does he try so hard to recruit his beloved niece to the firm? One notes that he does an awful job of selling the firm, but is somehow successful at it. We never see any indication that Anonymous Lawyer is anything other than absurdly incompetent at client relations, human relations, firm politics, Machiavellian manipulation, or recruiting. How did he ever get to be a partner in the first place? He's in a position of power when the book starts; there's a small reference to unhappy days in high school, but no hint of the 25 years in between then and now, and one can't bring oneself to care whether the career path continues upwards or fails to do so.

One could nitpick at other things: why does the cynical hiring partner have a reverence for Yale Law when real-life cynical hiring partners sneer at Yale Law graduates as prima donnas who have never learned anything practical in their Critical Gender Theory classes and have to be trained from scratch? How the heck does a hiring partner have so much time to bill law partner hours, run a recruiting program where he's attending or organizing nearly every event, write lengthy blog posts in the middle of the day (and go through the hundreds of emails those blog posts generate), and still be able to drop references to pop culture as well as any twenty-something? (The fact that we never see the protagonist deal with a client, an opposing counsel, a hiring committee meeting, or a business trip may have something to do with it.)

There are funny moments, such as the scavenger hunt where summer associates have no trouble tracking down a suicide note. But even as a matter of humor, the book doesn't quite work, because the tone isn't consistent. Sometimes the book strives to be a realistic view of law firm life with earnest regrets of sacrifices made; sometimes it's an over-the-top cartoon where paralegals quietly suffer lower-caste status and are given sub-standard food at the same events attorneys attend, and are lucky not to be left for dead in photocopying accidents. (Had Blachman spent more time in a law firm, he'd understand that long-time support staff and paralegals have more power than the junior associates. When I was a counsel, a favorite paralegal's complaint about treatment from a junior associate got a lot more weight than vice versa, because one is more fungible than the other, regardless of pay differentials. As satire goes, opportunity is missed because everything in the book is drawn in such broad strokes.)

I was wrong that this blog couldn't be translated into a novel; Blachman has the clever idea that the blog could be used as an unreliable narrator, something that fully comes into play in the last pages of the book. But Blachman's inexperience with his subject material and inconsistency in tone and characterization means that he ultimately fails to execute.

I'm surprised at the warm reception the book is getting in the blogosphere. I think part of it is aspirational, and part of it is that it's coming from summer associates and law students who don't hear the dissonant notes in the book. Which suggests that Blachman will have some success, and will get a second chance to write. More experienced attorneys, like David Giacalone and Ann Althouse didn't like the book; but the experienced Evan Schaeffer hints that his review will be good, so I look forward to his take. Perhaps if one finds more subjectively funny material in the book than I did, one is willing to forgive the problems with the book's structure and characterizations and dialogue.

I guess this means that I don't get a blurb, but I will say that the disturbingly comprehensive Anonymous Law Firm website is very funny, and one of the best parody websites I've ever seen, on a par with the newspaper and yearbook parodies that National Lampoon did in the 1970s:

# The most satisfied associates reported that they receive an average of 2-3 hours of sleep per night, while associates who reported an average of 7 or more hours of sleep per night found themselves most likely to receive additional assignments in the weeks following the study questionnaire.