Best of the Decade: #3 Janet Malcolm's "Iphigenia in Forest Hills"

Photo by James Messerschmidt, from Janet Malcolm's "Iphigenia in Forest Hills"

“Best of the Decade” is a selection of twelve of my favourite New Yorker pieces from the last ten years. Each month I choose a piece and try to say why I’m drawn to it. Today, I’m pleased to post my #3 pick – Janet Malcolm’s “Iphigenia in Forest Hills” (May 3, 2010).

The tagline of this great piece is “Anatomy of a murder trial.” That’s essentially what it is. Malcolm analyses all the participants – judges, lawyers, witnesses, jurors, even her fellow reporters. She takes nothing at face value. But she’s far from an objective onlooker. She’s fascinated by the accused, Mazoltuv Borukhova, a doctor accused of murdering her husband after a family court judge awarded him sole custody of their only child. Malcolm says, “She looked like a captive barbarian princess in a Roman triumphal procession.” She says, “Borukhova’s otherness was her defining characteristic.” She describes the case – a case that most people would consider open-and-shut – as an “enigma”: “She couldn’t have done it and she must’ve done it.”

You’ll notice that I said “judges” in the plural. There are two hearings intertwined here. One is the custody case, presided over by Judge Sidney Strauss. Strauss, not Borukhova, is the villain of the piece. It’s his decision that, in Malcolm’s words, “drove Borukhova to her terrible expedient.” She calls Strauss “petulant” and “irrational.” She says,

Courts routinely remove children from homes where they are neglected, abused, malnourished, traumatized. I know of no other case where a well-cared-for child is taken from its mother because it sits on her lap during supervised visits with an absent father and refuses to “bond” with him. 

The other hearing is the murder trial, presided over by Judge Robert Hanophy (known as “Hang’em Hanophy”), who is even more repellent than Strauss. Malcolm writes,

Hanophy is a man of seventy-four with a small head and a large body and the faux-genial manner that American petty tyrants cultivate. From his dais he looks out over the courtroom, taking in every spectator as well as every actor in the drama being played out under his direction. “You there with the cap,” he will raise his voice to say to a spectator. “Take it off. You can’t wear that in here.” In 1997, Hanophy was censured by the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct for making “undignified, discourteous and disparaging remarks” and being “mean-spirited” and “vituperative” during a sentencing. But a document of censure has no consequences. Hanophy’s absolute power remains unchanged, and he continues to exercise it with evident enjoyment, and without any sign of doubt.

Without any sign of doubt – what words could be said of a trial judge that are more damning than that? 

Malcolm views the trial skeptically. She sees it as “a contest between competing narratives.” We know from Malcolm’s previous work that she’s suspicious of narrative. “The true memory or dream or thought,” she says, in “Six Roses ou Cirrhose?” (The New Yorker, January 24, 1983), "is often so unformed and murky and inchoate that it cannot be expressed except by resort to narrative description, which somehow falsifies it.” In “Iphigenia in Forest Hills,” she says,

We go through life mishearing and mis-seeing and misunderstanding so that the stories we tell ourselves will add up. Trial lawyers push this human tendency to a higher level. They are playing for higher stakes than we are playing for when we tinker with actuality in order to transform the tale told by an idiot into an orderly, self-serving narrative.

She calls the trial process “artificial” and “inhuman.” But she also finds it fascinating, and she makes it fascinating to read. The “malleability of trial evidence” fascinates her. Cross-examination fascinates her (“A successful cross-examination is like a turn of the roulette wheel”). And she devours contradiction (“If witnesses abided by the oath to 'tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,' there wouldn’t be the contradictions between testimonies that give a trial its tense plot and the jury its task of deciding whom to believe”).

I think what makes this piece so memorable is Malcolm’s sympathy for Borukhova, a woman who, as Malcolm says, had "a way of getting under people’s skin and setting off serious allergic reactions.” Not many of us would have sympathy for such a person. But Malcolm does, so much so that she actually tries to intervene on Borukhova’s behalf (“Then I did something I have never done before as a journalist. I meddled with the story I was reporting. I entered it as a character who could affect its plot. I picked up the phone and called Stephen Scaring’s office”). The moment comes after Malcolm interviews one of the prosecution’s witnesses, David Schall, who is the court-appointed law guardian of Borukhova and her husband’s daughter. After the interview, Malcolm has such serious concerns about his mental stability that she calls Borukhova’s lawyer, Stephen Scaring. He asks her to fax him her notes of the interview. She does so, and next day in court Scaring moves for leave to recall Schall to question him concerning his mental health. Judge Hanophy denies the motion and the trial proceeds. But I’ve never forgotten the boldness of Malcolm’s move. It takes ovaries to do what she did. She damn near became a witness in the very trial she was covering.

Postscript: The book version of “Iphigenia in Forest Hills,” published in 2011, is slightly longer than the New Yorker piece. It contains a scene - one that doesn't appear in the magazine version - that is one of my favorites in all of Malcolm’s writings. It’s a description of a mosaic in the lobby of the courthouse where Borukhova’s trial was held. Malcolm says,

The mosaic is a wondrous sight, but, as people hurry through the security barrier toward the elevators, they do not take it in. I noticed it only because one day, during a long recess, I was walking around the courthouse looking for things to notice.

Malcolm goes on to describe the mosaic in detail. But it’s that “I was walking around the courthouse looking for things to notice” that I love. It perfectly captures the flâneurial sensibility in action. It's one of my touchstones.