[Yale University Press; 2011]

By Amanda Shubert

Janet Malcolm is arguably the most gifted cultural critic of her generation.  A journalist who transcends journalism, she has written on literature and photography, Freud and psychoanalysis, and criminal trials.  And though she has a consistent voice throughout her oeuvre—that astonishing clarity of perception, her novelistic renderings of character, and the invariably suspenseful thrill of her unfolding narrative, whatever the subject—you have the uncanny sense from one book to another you are reading a totally new writer, if only because Malcolm always sounds like the expert, never the journalist who has learned a new subject for an assignment.  She moves between topics with seamless ease because each allows her to engage a new facet of epistemological discovery—analyzing character, motive, and the politics of what we see and know and who we tell.  But what draws Malcolm to one topic over another tends not to be its potential for analysis but some component that resists analysis, leaving a remainder, an unknown.  That element of the inscrutable, the detail or dimension of a case study that cannot be fully captured or pinned down, is Malcolm’s true subject, and she finds it variously in Freud’s theories of the unconscious, the enigmatic legacy of Sylvia Plath, the stories of Chekhov, and murder trials.  (It’s a mark of Malcolm’s synthetic genius that no one of these fields seems like the hermeneutic for understanding the other; if she gives a Freudian reading of Chekhov, she also gives a literary reading of court proceedings.)

Malcolm’s newest book, Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial, details the proceedings and aftermath of the murder trial of Mazoltov Borukhova and Mikhail Mallayev for the murder of Daniel Malakov, Borukhova’s late husband, in the winter of 2009. Malakov was shot dead by Mallayev, ostensibly hired as a hit man by Borukhova, at a playground in Forest Hills, Queens, with his then four year-old daughter Michelle in tow.  The book is a kind of guided tour of the workings of a murder trial, and though Malcolm is occasionally a character in her own narrative, we see the trial through her eyes.  She really does give an anatomy of the trial, demystifying the courtroom as seen on television, but most enticing are the specifics of this case.  She profiles each individual player in the drama, not least the press corps sitting in the front row, alternately listening, jotting notes, and filling in crossword puzzles.  (My favorite description is of Borukhova herself: “she was dressed in a mannish black jacket and a floor-length black skirt, and she wore her long, dark, tightly curled hair hanging down her back, bound by a dark cord.  She looked rather like a nineteenth-century woman-student revolutionary”).  If criminal law is a set of competing narratives that succeed or fail on the strength of their storytelling, Malcolm both identifies with and transcends the methods of the court room—she shows the human identity of the impersonal law, the fragility and foibles of its practitioners and the mercenary power of its effect.

The title Iphigenia in Forest Hills signals that this is a story with the tenor of Greek tragedy, and all of its ambiguity about culpability and character—it is no accident that Freud used the Greeks, most famously Oedipus, in his theories about how the unconscious rules our waking lives.  It also suggests a comparison between the story of Iphigenia and Malakov’s murder.  Yet it’s surprising to find that Malcolm never actually takes up the comparison between Iphigenia and Michelle, who is the collateral damage of her parents’ marriage, her father’s murder, and the gruesome court proceedings.  In Greek literature and myth, Iphigenia is the daughter of Clytemnestra and the famed soldier Agamemnon, who fought alongside Achilles in the Trojan War.  On the way to war, the winds stop and the Greeks’ ship will not sail; the only way to appease the gods is for Agamemnon to sacrifice Iphigenia.  In revenge, Clytemnestra murders her husband when he returns, triumphant, from the war.  But it’s more complicated than this, at least in the way Aeschylus tells it in his Oresteia—Clytemnestra is jealous of the lover Agamemnon took in Troy, and she herself has taken a lover, Aegisthis, who, like Mallayev in the Borukhova trial, assists her with the murder.

Malcolm is known for deconstructing the process of writing her books as she does it; it’s a little like watching Escher’s hand drawing the hand (but because Malcolm is more fundamentally a storyteller than a philosopher, her writing never feels vertiginous, or gimmicky).  Yet she never deconstructs the metaphor that makes up the first half of her title.  It sits there, hovering above the story, offering a bit of clarity here, a moment of obscurity there, not an analog but a presence or a trace.

The metaphor functions like the courtroom in Malcolm’s narrative, which symbolizes the system of logic or meaning that seems to grasp all but leaves something crucial in abeyance.  What is left behind in Iphigenia in Forest Hills?  Michelle.  One parent dead and the other in prison, she is homeless and her future uncertain; by the end of the book we know that her lawyer, David Schnall, is not only negligent but delusional, too.  She is the person best equipped with the lived experience of her parents’ marriage to testify about their motives, but though children absorb everything, they don’t have the language to speak out.  She saw her father killed; she represents witness without testimony, trauma without catharsis, the enigma the journalist fails to solve.

Iphigenia in Forest Hills draws attention to the procedures of law and of journalism, but more fundamentally for its readers, it casts into relief the experience of bearing witness.  Malcolm is so compelling and so damning because by transcribing what she witnesses, she implicates the reader in the case and its relentless and irreducible moral ambiguity.


 
 
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