'She couldn't have done it and she must have done it'. This is the enigma at the heart of Janet Malcolm's riveting new book about a murder trial in the insular Bukharan-Jewish community of Forest Hills, Queens, that captured national attention. The defendant, Mozoltuv Barukhova, a beautiful young physician, is accused of hiring an assassin to kill her estranged husband, Daniel Malakov, a respected orthodontist, in the presence of their four-year old child. The prosecutor calls it an act of vengeance: just weeks before Malakov was killed in cold blood, Michelle was taken from her mother's home, and for inexplicable reasons, custody was given to her father. It is Borukhova's tragic fate, and the 'Dickensian ordeal' of her innocent child, that drives Malcolm's inquiry. With the intellectual and emotional precision for which she is known, Malcolm looks at the trial - 'a contest between competing narratives' - from every conceivable angle. As she writes, 'An attorney who bores and irritates the jury during his opening statement, no matter what evidence he may later produce, has put his case at fatal risk'. But it is the chasm between our ideals of justice and the human factors that influence every trial - from divergent lawyering abilities, to the nature of jury selection, the malleability of evidence, the bias of the judge, and a child welfare system that can be indifferent or even perverse - that is perhaps most striking. Surely one of the most keenly observed trial books ever written, "Iphegenia in Forest Hills" is ultimately about character, gamesmanship, and 'reasonable doubt'. As Jeffrey Rosen writes, it is 'as suspenseful and exciting as a detective story, with all the moral and intellectual interest of a great novel'.
Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial
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"In brave and crisp language, Malcolm formulates a verdict to resonate beyond the courtroom."--David Astle, ABC Radio (Au), "The Book Show"--David Astle "The Book Show "
About the Author
Janet Malcolm is the author of Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, which won the PEN Biography Award, The Journalist and the Murderer, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Reading Chekhov, Burdock, and other distinguished books. Malcolm writes frequently for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, and lives in New York City.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Malcolm the New Yorker sophisticate was the wrong person to cover this trial; she contrives to make voyeurs of us all. Yes, things like this happen all the time, all over the world, but without some kind of resolution, either emotional or practical, our participation is little else but prurience - or for New York Jewry, particularly its more orthodox component, an appalled Schadenfreude at this glimpse of some of their more benighted brethren, in this case from Bukhara (now part of Uzbekistan). Trial buffs may 'enjoy' it too - who knows? - but this works neither as reportage nor literature. Don't be tainted. Give it a miss
Style note: woeful construction aside, the doggedly, goodhumouredly deadpan New Yorker house style, as stylised in its way as the old Time Magazine of Henry Luce, jars in such a context. I offer this sample, from an earlier attempt at a review: 'she and I offered each other tastes of the sandwiches and fruit we'd brought from home, and struggled with the enigma of the case' Specifics, Janet, specifics - pomegranate or watermelon? (p32,114) But I guess the New Yorker is still a parish magazine at heart
Style note: woeful construction aside, the doggedly, goodhumouredly deadpan New Yorker house style, as stylised in its way as the old Time Magazine of Henry Luce, jars in such a context. I offer this sample, from an earlier attempt at a review: 'she and I offered each other tastes of the sandwiches and fruit we'd brought from home, and struggled with the enigma of the case' Specifics, Janet, specifics - pomegranate or watermelon? (p32,114) But I guess the New Yorker is still a parish magazine at heart
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3.1 out of 5 stars
18 reviews
21 of 22 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Troubling and intriguing
17 May 2011
By kevnm
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Hardcover
I was initially disoriented by Ms. Malcolm's account, expecting the "anatomy" promised by the subtitle. The word suggested to me an ordered analysis of a system, in this case the justice system. What the reader gets, though, is a deeply felt meditation on the impossibility of objectivity, the very limited "truth" allowed through the strictures of the legal system, the bewildering treatment of children by legal and social service agencies,the petty tyranny of judges, and our indeterminate sense of equality. Incidents and personalities appear, fade, and reappear, eschewing a temporal, linear flow; This is by no means a straight, suspense-filled true crime account. Rather it is a thoughtful (and appropriately disordered) reflection on why no system that involves humans can ever make complete sense or produce fair, coherent results. Malcolm is a clear thinker and an able guide through this dark territory. Scenes from this case will stay with you a long time. Terrific read.
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
the Journalist and the Murderer redux
24 Jun 2011
By Gerald A. Heverly
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Hardcover
It's certainly true that Janet Malcolm is not a traditional courtroom reporter. In this case Malcolm carries you with her in apparent skepticism about the guilty verdict, even as she piles on trial details that would--without her mediation--seem clearly to implicate and convict the defendants, Mazoltuv Borukhova and Mikhail Mallayev. Malcolm does everything she can to wring sympathy for Ms. Borukhova, though just about everyone else in this book despises her. We learn that Borukhova has been apparently mistreated by one judge (in a custody battle) and now she is getting less-than-perfect 'justice' from the judge in her murder trial. We further learn that the two keys pieces of evidence against her are dubious (an indistinct, muffled translation of a Russian conversation; and a partial finger print). Whether she is guilty or not I leave to the reader.
What fascinated me about this book is its connection to Malcolm's best book, *The Journalist and the Murderer*. That book revolved around Malcolm's own misgivings about the things that journalists do to get the story. It's a complicated story within a story within a story about one journalist's relationship with a criminal defendant and Malcolm's own relationship with the author. Among other sins Malcolm ruminates about how journalists ingratiate themselves with people they secretly revile--all in the name of getting access to the kinds of details that sell a story.
And yet here, many years later, Malcolm describes her own use of that same method: "Joseph and Nalia {relatives of the victim} evidently felt no impropriety in speaking unguardedly to a journalist," remarks Malcolm, no doubt fascinated herself at people's willingness to spill the beans for that modicum of glory you can get by being quoted in The New Yorker (or the subsequent book). At another point Malcolm reveals that she was so alarmed at the apparent lunacy of one witness in the trial (whom she interviewed) that she 'meddled with the story I was reporting." It's Malcolm's honesty that makes her writing so compelling. You sense that she isn't sure if she is qualified to decide whether Ms. Borukhova is really guilty and that anything she writes is tainted by her own biases. Yet she isn't sure that the jury system is any better. Who is more suspect: a lying, conniving journalist or the paid lunatics who populate the court system?
What fascinated me about this book is its connection to Malcolm's best book, *The Journalist and the Murderer*. That book revolved around Malcolm's own misgivings about the things that journalists do to get the story. It's a complicated story within a story within a story about one journalist's relationship with a criminal defendant and Malcolm's own relationship with the author. Among other sins Malcolm ruminates about how journalists ingratiate themselves with people they secretly revile--all in the name of getting access to the kinds of details that sell a story.
And yet here, many years later, Malcolm describes her own use of that same method: "Joseph and Nalia {relatives of the victim} evidently felt no impropriety in speaking unguardedly to a journalist," remarks Malcolm, no doubt fascinated herself at people's willingness to spill the beans for that modicum of glory you can get by being quoted in The New Yorker (or the subsequent book). At another point Malcolm reveals that she was so alarmed at the apparent lunacy of one witness in the trial (whom she interviewed) that she 'meddled with the story I was reporting." It's Malcolm's honesty that makes her writing so compelling. You sense that she isn't sure if she is qualified to decide whether Ms. Borukhova is really guilty and that anything she writes is tainted by her own biases. Yet she isn't sure that the jury system is any better. Who is more suspect: a lying, conniving journalist or the paid lunatics who populate the court system?
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
So Much for Common Law, What About an Inquisitorial System?
25 Nov 2011
By Martin Chorich
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Hardcover
Readers expecting a True Crime potboiler should go elsewhere. Instead, we have Janet Malcolm, a literary journalist strongly influenced by psychology and structuralism inquiring, into the possibility of justice in an adversarial trial system. She analyzes the Borukhova case as matter of competing narratives offered by prosecution and defense with a judge acting in a triple role of ringmaster, spectator, and sentencing oracle. Needless to say, while trials of this kind make for good theater, they have a hit-and-miss approach to getting at the truth of matters. Frankly, the hard evidence points towards Ms. Borukhova's guilt, but the theatrics of the system require the prosecutor to go beyond factual presentation and into layering on the story-telling necessary for the jury to visualize and actuate a guilty verdict. The defense tells stories, too, aimed at disrupting the prosecutor's portrait of the defendant as a stressed-out but legally guilty orchestrator of a murder for hire. Malcolm's post-trial interviews with jury members indicate that their perceptions of the defendant's demeanor, personal appearance, and inability to culturally connect influenced them to accept the prosecution narrative, especially the elements that depart from physical or witness evidence of the crime itself.
On the whole, this makes for an interesting book, but Malcolm has covered this ground before. From a structuralist point of view, she clearly finds adversarial trial system an absurdity if truth telling is important to the legal system. I'd be very interested to see her apply the same analytical framework to European-style inquisitorial criminal justice procedures. Do they do a better job of things, or is human justice impossible?
On the whole, this makes for an interesting book, but Malcolm has covered this ground before. From a structuralist point of view, she clearly finds adversarial trial system an absurdity if truth telling is important to the legal system. I'd be very interested to see her apply the same analytical framework to European-style inquisitorial criminal justice procedures. Do they do a better job of things, or is human justice impossible?
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3.1 out of 5 stars
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