Book Review

EVERY PARENT'S NIGHTMARE

Some defense attorneys burn out because they come to believe they are doing
little more than hastening criminals back onto the street.

Author Ayelet Waldman, a former federal public defender in Los Angeles, had
the opposite problem: She got tired of seeing "innocents" taking the fall
in America's war on drugs.

"I thought I would be seeing kingpins going to jail, but the kingpins
negotiate deals and go to jail for very little time," Waldman says. "It's
the people who are on the lowest rungs on the ladder, and so have no
information to sell, who go to prison for a long time -- the guy who
carries the box or the woman who takes a phone message."

She was in Chicago recently promoting her new novel about one of those
women, Daughter's Keeper (Sourcebooks, $24).

Lawmakers who set up the rules of engagement for America's "war on drugs"
instituted stiff mandatory minimum sentences for those convicted of
trafficking in illegal substances, so that a judge or jury can't try to
single out a particular defendant for more lenient treatment.

"After a while, I thought, I can't do this anymore," she says. "Rapists,
pedophiles get out of jail sooner than my clients would. I wasn't helping
anything funneling these people through the system."

In Daughter's Keeper, Waldman follows one young woman, Olivia Goodman,
whose undocumented Mexican lover, Jorge Rodriguez, thinks a quick drug deal
or two will provide him with enough money to get established in the United
States.

Jorge doesn't realize that the acquaintance who proposed he get involved
with selling drugs in the first place is an informant for the federal Drug
Enforcement Agency. Jorge is arrested, and in order to reduce his own
sentence, he tells DEA agents that Olivia was also involved.

Olivia had tried to dissuade Jorge from selling drugs, but because she was
in the car when he went to pick up the drugs and she conveyed a phone
message about the deal, she faces 10 years in prison.

"I saw lots and lots of cases like this," Waldman says. "There is no such
thing as a female kingpin in the drug trade. Women are always involved
because of their boyfriends or husbands. The women never [inform] on the
men; the men always [inform] on the women. They're the least culpable and
they often do the most time. And then their children go into the foster
care system, and because there are so few women's prisons, the women are
sent all over the country and may not see their children for years."

The "daughter's keeper" of the title is Olivia's mother, Elaine, whose
early neglect of her daughter returns to her as an ordeal of remorse when
Olivia is arrested.

Waldman likes the fact that Daughter's Keeper, which has plenty of tense
courtroom scenes, centers on the relationship between Elaine and Olivia.

"This is every parent's nightmare," she says. "I set out to write a searing
indictment on the war on drugs and wound up writing about the relationship
between mothers and children. I am a little worried that I only have one
topic of conversation, but it is mythic, the most profound topic of our
society."

Waldman's own mother is nothing like Elaine, although she did work while
Ayelet and her brother were young and was "horrified" when Ayelet
(pronounced "I YELL it"; it means "gazelle" in Hebrew) left the public
defender's office to be with her daughter, Sophie, then 2-1/2.

Waldman had looked up one day and realized, "I was a really good mother to
50 guys sitting in the federal detention center and a really crappy mother
to this curly-haired little girl sitting at home."

Reared in a "typical middle-class Jewish family," mostly in New Jersey,
Waldman now is a Berkeley, Calif., stay-at-home mom to four children, ages
7 months to 8 years, except for the few hours a day she sneaks off to a
cafe with her husband, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon, to
write books, side-by-side, on their laptops.

She started with a mystery, Nursery Crimes, the first in her successful
"Mommy Track" series, featuring former federal public defender/stay-at-home
mom/amateur sleuth Juliet Applebaum. The latest in the series is Death Gets
a Time-Out.

Eventually, Waldman felt up to taking on a mainstream novel and followed
the proverbial advice to novices: write about what you know. Daughter's
Keeper was the result.

Not only is she horrified by the cost the war on drugs extracts from the
small fry caught in its machinery, but Waldman also says the campaign has
been a colossal failure.

"Vietnam was nothing compared to the war on drugs," she says. "We spend $50
billion a year fighting it. All we do is make mistakes. And don't think
it's just a Republican cause. [President Bill] Clinton ratcheted up the
drug war more than anyone. It's an easy way for the Democrats to appear to
be tough on crime."

Waldman is back at work on a couple of books -- and her husband is working
on a new book, too, after last year's Summerland for young adults.
Normally, Waldman takes being married to a leading novelist in stride, but
that has changed a bit now that Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of
Kavalier & Clay and Wonder Boys, is writing his first murder mystery.

"I've never been jealous of him--that would be silly. He's out of my
league. But I will be jealous if he wins the Edgar [Allan Poe Award, a top
prize for mysteries]," she says.

The next Mommy Track mystery, Murder Plays House, is due out next June, and
Waldman, whose family came to the United States from Montreal, is also
working on The Bloom Girls, a mainstream novel based on her paternal
grandmother's family.

It's about -- what else? --"struggling against the bonds of family,
ultimately accepting and embracing them," she says.

"There is no such thing as a female kingpin in the drug trade. Women are
always involved because of their boyfriends or husbands ... women are the
least culpable and they often do the most time."