If you’re looking to get some pleasure reading done during this quiet period between Christmas and New Year’s, I have a recommendation for you: Tuttle in the Balance, the new comic novel by Jay Wexler, a professor at Boston University School of Law. Tuttle is the delightful, funny, and also moving tale of a Supreme Court justice at a personal crossroads. As our resident culture critic Harry Graff put it in his review, “The novel, which is a cross between American Beauty and the works of Christopher Buckley, is a humorous and enjoyable read for any lawyer or law student.”

I recently interviewed Professor Wexler about Tuttle, what inspired him to write it, how he did his research for it, and how he approached the sensitive subject of a Supreme Court justice having sex. Here’s what we discussed.

DL: Congratulations on Tuttle in the Balance! Pretend you’re doing an article abstract for it on SSRN — can you summarize it for our readers in about a paragraph?

JW: Thanks! I’m tempted to take you literally on the SSRN scholarly article abstract thing by pointing out that Tuttle in the Balance “fills a gap” in the “literature” at the “intersection” of Supreme Court studies and soft-core pornography, but instead I’ll just say that the novel is about a Supreme Court justice having a midlife crisis in the middle of one of the biggest terms in recent history. Justice Ed Tuttle is sixty-two, a little bored and frustrated with his job, very horny, restless, and drinking too much. Faced with having to decide a couple of high-profile constitutional cases and suddenly enamored by the absurdist philosophy of an ancient Chinese philosopher, Ed struggles with how, and even whether, he should do his job.

DL: Before this recent foray into fiction, you’ve enjoyed a very successful career as a legal academic, perhaps most well-known for your study of humor during Supreme Court oral arguments (which, as noted in Harry Graff’s review, makes a cameo in Tuttle). What inspired you to write a novel?

JW: “Very successful” is a bit of an overstatement. I’d say more like “not entirely unsuccessful.” But as to the question, I’ve written fiction my whole life. I started when I was nine writing puppet show scripts, and in my early thirties I even wrote a “novel” called Arrivederci, Loser about a walking, talking blueberry muffin who suddenly shows up in the apartment of two twenty-something slackers in Chicago. It was absolutely horrendous. When I was pre-tenure here at BU, I wrote short stories and humor pieces on the side to keep me sane, and one of them was about Ed Tuttle on summer vacation in Jackson Hole having lots of sex and then getting overconfident and embarrassing himself in front of a Liz-Phair-inspired rock singer. I loved the character and decided I’d see what would happen to him when he got back to the Court in October, and that’s what led me to the novel.

DL: One of the (many) things I loved about the novel was its realistic behind-the-scenes look at what takes place at One First Street — the oral arguments, the justices’ conference, and the interactions between a justice and his clerks. You are a former SCOTUS clerk yourself, having clerked for Justice Ginsburg in October Term 1998. How much did your experience clerking for the Court inform the novel, and what sources other than that experience did you turn to when researching the book?

JW: I guess that even though Tuttle’s Court is quite different from the real Court, having clerked there gave me the confidence to write about the place and to put in some details that I otherwise might not have known. The Chinese philosophy part of the book comes from my pre-law days as an East Asian Studies major and a Religious Studies grad student. I actually did my senior thesis in college on the philosopher who Tuttle becomes enamored with, so it was really fun going back to those days and combining them with my interest in the Court. I also play the ukulele, so when Ed is having trouble playing the E chord, that comes from my personal experience. I can’t hit the E to save my life.

DL: I was struck — and I hope this comment encourages readers to pick up Tuttle — by how much sex is in the book, in terms of both the occasional sex scene but also Justice Tuttle’s unfulfilled wishes. It’s not often that we get to imagine what carnal desires our justices might be harboring “underneath their robes,” so to speak. Did you find it difficult to write about a judge’s sex life, and can you talk a bit about your approach to writing about this sensitive subject?

JW: Much of the point of Tuttle (and the Supreme Court [laughter] stuff too, for that matter) is to humanize judges, and what could be more human than having sex? Judges have sex! From the First Circuit to the Ninth Circuit, from the lowest magistrate to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, they’re all (mostly) having sex! Isn’t it great? And writing about sex is fun, particularly bad sex or weird sex. One of my ten lessons for writing humor is “write about sex, by all means, but make it bad sex, because good sex isn’t funny.” And writing about a justice having sex isn’t any more difficult than writing about anyone else. In fact, it’s a little more fun, because, especially if it’s like the first date or something, you can easily imagine the other person thinking the whole time, “Wow, I’m having sex with a justice–that’s so weird!”

DL: You do a wonderful job of humanizing judges in Tuttle — and humanizing high-powered judges and lawyers is, of course, a project we fully support here at Above the Law. Do you have any plans for continuing this work, either in a sequel featuring Ed Tuttle or in a novel centered on some other sector of the legal profession — law schools and their professors, perhaps?

JW: Well, humanizing judges might be a challenge, but humanizing law professors–now that might be impossible! No, no, just joking about that. We’re very human and cuddly. But actually I don’t have any current plans to write another novel about the legal profession at the moment. I’m slowly trying to write a book about a professor on sabbatical in Buenos Aires who gets caught up in a Borges-like absurd plot. I guess I could make him a law professor, but it still wouldn’t really be about the legal profession so much as being about a guy who steals a capybara from the central Buenos Aires zoo and keeps it in his bathroom.

DL: If it’s half as entertaining as Tuttle, I will look forward to reading it, despite its lack of connection to the legal profession. Congrats again, and thanks for taking the time to chat!

Tuttle in the Balance [Amazon (affiliate link)]

Earlier: Standard Of Review: Satire At The Supreme Court In New Novel ‘Tuttle In The Balance’