SOURCE: “Paretsky, Turow, and the Importance of Symbolic Ethnicity,” in MidAmerica XVIII: The Yearbook of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, edited by David D. Anderson, Midwestern Press, 1991, pp. 124-35.

In the following essay, Szuberla discusses the importance of ethnic identity to the character Rusty Sabich in Scott Turow's book Presumed Innocent and to protagonist V. I. Warshawski in Sara Paretsky's detective novels.

“I really thought I was Joe College. That's who I wanted to be, and that's who I thought I was. Really, I thought I was fucking Beaver Cleaver, or whoever the boy next door is these days. I really did.” What Rusty Sabich acknowledges in this angry confession, somewhere near the heart of Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent, is his abiding sense of his own “strangeness.” Like Sarah Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski, Sabich alternately affirms and denies his ethnic past. More precisely, both Sarah...