The ObserverTrue crime booksReviewJanet Malcolm's pitiless examination of a murder trial creates a nagging sense of uneaseThere are only two writers whose work I can say I have read in its entirety. The first is Jane Austen. The second is Janet Malcolm, who is a staff writer at the New Yorker, and whose subjects have included, over the years, psychoanalysis ("the impossible profession"), Sylvia Plath, Anton Chekhov and Gertrude Stein. Malcolm's masterpiece, though, is The Journalist and the Murderer, a brilliant and pitiless examination of journalistic ethics built around the lawsuit filed by Jeffrey MacDonald, a convicted killer, against Joe McGinniss, author of a book about his crimes. "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," wrote Malcolm in an opening sentence that caused a sensation in the tiny, self-referential world of posh American journalism. Yet a full two decades on, she is still at it. The truth might be elusive. It might even – like psychoanalysis – be "impossible". But this doesn't make the idea of pursuing it any easier to resist; some of us are just born beady. As she puts it with characteristic understatement in a rare interview in the latest Paris Review: "Journalism, with its mandate to notice small things, was always congenial to me."
Malcolm's new book, Iphigenia in Forest Hills, tells the story of the 2009 joint murder trial of Mazoltuv Borukhova, a 34-year-old doctor, and Mikhail Mallayev, her 50-year-old cousin by marriage whom she hired to shoot her estranged husband, Daniel Malakov, in 2007. (The trial took place in Queens, where Malcolm followed its every twist for the New Yorker.) Trials, of course, are about finality: the truth is established, a gavel is banged, everyone goes home happy. But Malcolm is not so easily pleased. It's not particularly that she doubts the guilt of those in the dock. It's more that, in this courtroom, motives are so confusingly muddy. Even the judge, Robert Hanophy, behaves badly, making his bias in favour of the prosecution too clear, it is suggested, because he has a Caribbean holiday booked, and is determined to make his flight (as the trial draws to a close, Hanophy forces Borukhova's lawyer to prepare his summation overnight; the prosecutor has the whole weekend to wrestle with his).
From her reporter's seat, Malcolm observes that a trial is merely "a contest between competing narratives". The most consistent story wins, not the truth: "In life, no story is told exactly the same way twice. As the damp clay of actuality passes from hand to hand, it assumes different artful shapes. We expect it to. Only in trials is making it pretty equated with making it up." On a landing at the Queens supreme courthouse, she notices a wondrous mosaic: a complex allegory over which hovers a tipped scale of justice. Staring at it, she sees that the pan that is low on the ground is empty, while the pan that is high in the air holds a book. "Is this a comment on the weightlessness of the law? Or is it just [the artist] exercising his gravity-defying artist's imagination...?" It's in this manner, eyebrows only slightly raised, that she sets about sowing her insistent little seeds of doubt.
Malcolm has written a fascinating story, if not exactly a gripping one; indeed, she eschews dramatic tension at every turn, even when the verdict is returned (which makes me think that it was on the encouragement of Malcolm that her publisher produced such a frustratingly ascetic book; not a single photograph of the beautiful and baffling Borukhova is included). Malakov was gunned down in broad daylight in a children's playground where he stood with his four year-old-daughter, Michelle, but the bloody logistics of this interest Malcolm far less than the backstory to the case, not to mention the many smaller questions that are raised by the trial, only to hang over it, unsolved (for instance: Borukohova secretly taped even the most anodyne conversations with Mallayev, and never explained why).
The backstory has mostly to do with "otherness". Borukhova is a Bukharan Jew from Uzbekistan, and thus is a member of a particularly inward-looking sect, one viewed with suspicion even by other Jewish immigrants. Seemingly pious, she grows thinner and thinner during the trial (the correct kosher meals are not, she insists, available in prison).
Malcolm, unlike just about everyone else involved in the case, has a measure of sympathy for her. But she recognises, too, her contrary nature, her stubbornness, her unreadability (which a jury will take to be coldness). It's also her contention – or her instinct – that the die was cast when Borukhova and Malokov separated and began a custody fight for Michelle. The child's court-appointed guardian, David Schnall, took a dislike to Borukhova, with the result that she lost this battle, even though she had accused her husband of molesting Michelle. (The prosecution disbelieved these accusations, and argued that her motive for the murder was simply to get Michelle back). This startling ruling leads Malcolm uncertainly into the relatively new field of children's rights. Her tentative conclusion? The concept is a smokescreen, "a mantra invoked by adults to help them in their own fights with other adults".
Michelle, then, is the Iphigenia of the title (in the Greek myth, Iphigenia was sacrificed by her father, Agamemnon, so that his fleet might sail to the Trojan war; she is avenged by her mother, Clytemnestra, who stabs and kills her husband on his return). In the book's most unnerving scene, Malcolm passes Michelle in the street. She is with a group of her paternal relatives. Her face is "distorted by mirthless laughter".
What does all this add up to? Something of a curiosity, I think. This is not Malcolm's best book. Her story is in essence parochial, and its preoccupations are with the quotidian aspects of justice as much as the human. She has chosen to write about the trial of someone who is guilty, not to investigate some terrible miscarriage of justice (though Borukhova, represented by the celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz, is currently appealing against her sentence). Nevertheless, it does its work. The unease grows, like a shadow, with the result that her essay's after-effect is entirely disproportionate to its brevity. The disquiet stays with you. It's there in the pit of your stomach.
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