Gimlet Eye Observes Murder Case, by Dwight Garner

Gimlet Eye Observes Murder Case, by Dwight Garner

IPHIGENIA IN FOREST HILLS

Anatomy of a Murder Trial

By Janet Malcolm

155 pages. Yale University Press. $25.

In his best book, the nonfiction collection “Killings” (1984), Calvin Trillin described what attracts him — and so many other writers — to murder stories. “When someone dies suddenly shades are drawn up,” Mr. Trillin wrote. Lives are laid bare. A murder “gives us an excuse to be there,” he said, “poking around in somebody’s life.”

When reporters talk about covering killings, they are really talking, most of the time, about covering trials. The courts are where, under oath, the most confounding secrets are spilled. Janet Malcolm’s astringent and absorbing new book, “Iphigenia in Forest Hills,” is set mostly in a Queens courtroom, and in it she declares: “Murder violates the social contract, and makes a mockery of privacy.”

Ms. Malcolm is squeamish about the way courts strip people of their secrets. She is even more squeamish about how reporters feast upon the resulting carnage. In her new book she writes sourly about journalism: “Human frailty continues to be the currency in which it trades. Malice remains its animating impulse.” She adds: “A trial offers unique opportunities for journalistic heartlessness.”

These quotations may sound familiar, because Ms. Malcolm has rained, acidly and from a great height, on journalists and journalism before. Her book “The Journalist and the Murderer” (1990) contains a first sentence that is perhaps the most notorious in the history of literary nonfiction: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”

It’s always a bit breathtaking when Ms. Malcolm writes this way about journalism. In part that’s true because she has a point, one that is rarely put so hawkishly. In part, too, it’s because she’s such a cruel journalistic opportunist herself. Craig Seligman, writing in Salon, has dilated on her essential “not-niceness.”

The journalist Robert S. Boynton once put that quality this way: “Don’t ever eat in front of Janet Malcolm; or show her your apartment; or cut tomatoes while she watches.” He added: “Your every unflattering gesture and nervous tic will be recorded with devastating precision.” You may even, he suggested, “want to sue.”

Ms. Malcolm attacks journalism in her new book as if making a blood offering to the reportorial gods before proceeding with an ugly but necessary job. Reading her in this vein is like watching a cook muster an argument for veganism while drenched in blood and vigorously deboning a steer. I am not like you, she seems to say to her fellow journalists, while intoning on a higher, weirder frequency: I am you.

Her lack of self-consciousness is its own kind of self-consciousness. Thus Roland Barthes’s Latin motto could also be hers: “Larvatus prodeo,” or, “I advance, pointing to my mask.”

“Iphigenia in Forest Hills” began its life, as have most of Ms. Malcolm’s books, as an article for The New Yorker. It tells the story a young internist, Mazoltuv Borukhova, accused of hiring an assassin in 2007 to kill her estranged husband, an orthodontist, not long after he had been granted custody of their 4-year-old child. This story plays out amid the otherness of the insular Bukharan-Jewish community of Forest Hills, Queens.

Dr. Borukhova appears to be, quite plainly, guilty. In the three weeks before her husband’s murder, she spoke to the assassin, a man she barely knew, 91 times by cellphone. And yet Ms. Malcolm’s sympathies are with her. She portrays Dr. Borukhova as a victim (especially in terms of losing her child) in a process she barely understood.

“What missteps had she made,” Ms. Malcolm writes, “to place herself under state control as powerful and arbitrary as that of the old Soviet regime?”

Ms. Malcolm puts her book’s animating enigma this way: “She couldn’t have done it and she must have done it.”

“Iphigenia in Forest Hills” casts, from its first pages, a genuine spell — the kind of spell to which Ms. Malcolm’s admirers (and I am one) have become addicted. It is possible to remark that this is not among her very best books and yet observe that it delivers an extraordinary amount of pleasure.

Ms. Malcolm’s books have wintry atmospheres — both intellectual and aesthetic — that derive partly from the way she takes facts and attaches them, like someone hanging tea-light candles from high rafters, to mythology and classic literature, mostly Russian. The new book takes place in modern-day New York, but in Ms. Malcolm’s telling it might as well be Leningrad in 1952.

The accused doctor is described as looking “rather like a 19th-century woman-student revolutionary.” The lead prosecutor resembles “a Bulgarian psychiatrist.” Dr. Borukhova’s father-in-law has “something of the louche emotionality of a character in an Isaac Bashevis Singer story.”

When a relative recalls, in the courtroom, the dead man eating a pomegranate, the Comp Lit student in Ms. Malcolm pounces. “Of course he was eating a pomegranate,” she writes. “Characters in Russian literature are always eating (or offering) fruit at significant moments.”

Ms. Malcolm’s range of reference is impressive but scaled to let in only one kind of heat. It would be interesting to put Tom Wolfe (a humidifier) and Ms. Malcolm (a dehumidifier) on the same court case and let them fight it out for the available oxygen in the room.

Her observations about the legal system in America are fierce and finely ground. Upon seeing the cell on Rikers Island in which Dr. Borukhova spent 13 months before her case was tried, she writes, “My visit only confirmed the hollowness of the concept of presumption of innocence.”

Throughout she describes the courtroom as a theater and the trial as a ritual public performance, albeit one with warring narrators. Good trial lawyers, she writes, are like nonfiction writers, “storytellers who try to keep the lines of their stories straight and clean.”

One surprise in “Iphigenia in Forest Hills” is how much of her own humanity Ms. Malcolm admits as evidence. When the child’s family-court-appointed “law guardian” from the custody battle seems, during an interview, to be a mildly insane conspiracy theorist, she acts. She reports her notes of his rants to a defense lawyer.

“I did something I have never done before as a journalist,” she says. “I meddled with the story I was reporting.”

How un-Malcolmesque. How un-not-nice. But as she notes, “Rooting is in our blood; we take sides as we take breaths.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/27/books/janet-malcolms-nonfiction-iphigenia-in-forest-hills-review.html?ref=review&pagewanted=print