May 3, 2010 Issue

By far the most interesting article in this week’s issue is Janet Malcolm’s “Iphigenia In Forest Hills.” The story’s tagline – “Anatomy of a murder trial” – sums it up all right, but doesn’t really capture the eerie, twisted, deeply unsettling nature of the piece. The message I took from the story is that the American judicial system is rotten to the core and should be avoided at all costs. In other words, unless you want to get burned, stay away from court. Malcolm all but states this explicitly when she analyzes Borukhova’s counterclaim in the divorce action. In the counterclaim, Borukhova demands child support, spousal maintenance, medical insurance, life insurance, occupancy of the marital apartment, return of wedding gifts, etc. Malcolm says, “These demands diminish her; they put her autonomy in question. She was a practicing physician. She could have done what other able-bodied women do who divorce and wish to avoid entanglement with a troublesome mate. They walk away with nothing. But something impelled Borukhova – perhaps her early experience of authoritarianism – to remain in the dangerous game that she could’ve chosen not to play." "The dangerous game” would’ve made a good alternative title for this piece. In fact, at one point, Malcolm goes so far as to equate the American judicial system with “state control as powerful and arbitrary as that of the of the old Soviet regime.” And she makes a powerful case for it, showing the two judges (Judge Sidney Strauss, who presided over the divorce hearing, and Judge Robert Hanophy, who was in charge of the murder trial) to be tyrants, and the lawyers, particularly the crazed David Schnall, who was the court-appointed legal guardian of Borukhova and Mallayev’s young daughter, Michelle, as manipulative, flawed, at times incompetent, individuals. When I say “powerful,” “crazed,” “manipulative,” “flawed,” “incompetent,” obviously I’ve accepted Malcolm’s version of the trial. I would plead guilty to that. I found Malcolm’s piece utterly convincing as a portrait of a nightmarish justice system. I liked her refusal to accept the prosecution’s narrative or any narrative, for that matter. In this, I think she is exceptional. Most court reporters just go with the flow; it’s the easiest thing to do. But Malcolm resists. She is known for her distrust of narrative. “Our lives are not like novels,” she says in her great “Six Roses ou Cirrhose?” (The New Yorker, January 24, 1983). In “Iphigenia In Forest Hills,” she once again demonstrates this fundamental truth.