The "human tendency" to be seduced by coherent narratives and charismatic narrators, including ourselves, is the screw that turns in almost all of Janet Malcolm's work, from her early writing on psychoanalysis to 2007's Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice. Malcolm has made a career out of exposing our impulse towards self-deception, particularly when practised by those of us in pursuit of "pure" representations of reality. What she reveals is the reliance of factual accounts – whether produced by reporters, biographers, diarists or criminals mounting their own defences – on the conventions of fiction. The moment when we affirm the objectivity and accuracy of our vision is the moment we reveal our blind spots, to which no person or profession is immune.
In her newest book, Malcolm adds trial lawyers to the list of jobs implicated in the universal tendency to mishear, fail to see and misunderstand "so that the stories we tell ourselves will add up". A few pages into Iphigenia in Forest Hills, Malcolm's account of the 2009 murder trial of Mazoltuv Borukhova, a 35-year-old doctor accused of hiring co-defendant Mikhail Mallayev to murder her estranged husband, she quotes from prosecutor Brad Leventhal's opening statement: 28 October 2007 was "a bright, sunny, clear, brisk fall morning, and on that brisk fall morning a young man, a young orthodontist by the name of Daniel Malakov was walking down 64th Road in the Forest Hills section of Queens county ... With him was his little girl, his four-year-old daughter, Michelle." Michelle was still with Malakov a few moments later, when he was shot and killed.
For Malcolm – who brings to language the bright, penetrating attention of the English professor or the analyst, alert to telling turns of phrase and suggestive details – the style is always the thing. The "formidable" Leventhal opens his case as if it were a bedtime story, ornamenting his facts with the kind of rhetorical flourishes (vivid adjectives, incantatory repetition) familiar from fiction, and thus imbuing them with a self-sustaining logic, of the kind the phrase "once upon a time" confers on fairy tales. There is the suggestion that every event, no matter how implausible, is held together by some invisible explanation, which the storyteller will ultimately reveal.
The "mythic underpinning" in the prosecution's case was Borukhova's alleged desire for revenge. Three weeks before the murder, a state supreme court ruling had removed Michelle from her mother's custody and sent her to live with Malakov. An essential, unspoken feature of Leventhal's portrait of Borukhova as "the archetypal avenging murderess" was her ethnicity. Like Mallayev and Malakov, Borukhova – an Uzbek immigrant – is a Bukharan Jew. Sixty thousand members of the sect, which originated in central Asia, now reside in the US, most of them in the part of Queens where Borukhova lived. Another Soviet immigrant tells Malcolm that Bukharans are stereotyped as "alien and not altogether civilised – savage, tribal people, capable of violence, even of murder". Borukhova's relatives read prayer books in the courtroom and refused to speak to journalists.
Like fiction, legal cases aim for verisimilitude, which is not quite the same as the truth. "If any profession (apart from the novelist's) is in the business of making things up," writes Malcolm, "it is the profession of the trial lawyer." The image of Borukhova as the spirit of maternal vengeance was the glue with which Leventhal pasted incoherent scraps of information – among them a garbled and possibly mistranslated recording of a conversation between the defendants, forensic evidence that failed to meet the National Research Council's standards for scientific rigour, and nearly $40,000 in deposits into Mallayev's bank account that could not be traced back to Borukhova – into a coherent dramatic arc. His creation proved convincing. In March 2009, the jury found both defendants guilty on all counts of murder in the first and second degree.
What, wonders Malcolm, had Borukhova "misunderstood about her new country that set her on her blundering course toward Strauss", the judge who removed Michelle from Borukhova's care, and ultimately towards trial judge Robert Hanophy, who has the "faux-genial manner that American petty tyrants cultivate"? The answer is perhaps the value the American legal system places on intelligibility. Ambiguity is the enemy, and anyone who does not present herself as a like- ableorcoherent character is doomed.
Unwilling or unable to learn the native lines, Borukhova repeatedly turned in unsatisfying performances, first in the family court and later during her trial. Both the costume – long skirt, white jacket – and the delivery were wrong. Instead of addressing the jury, "she kept her head high" and her gaze fixed on the interrogator standing before her. "She looked," writes Malcolm, "like a captive barbarian princess in a Roman triumphal procession." Borukhova's failure to follow the standard script – her implacable, inscrutable "otherness" – provoked anger and suspicion. "She didn't seem upset," said one juror. "If you were innocent and being tried for murder, you'd be upset."
During the sentencing phase of the trial, Leventhal reads to the jury a letter from Malakov's nephew, who recalls his uncle speaking fondly about Michelle while eating a pomegranate. Malcolm's interpretation is brief but astonishing: "Of course he was eating a pomegranate." Under her brilliant gaze, a seemingly incidental detail shines suddenly with meaning. Gurov's watermelon, Oblonsky's pear: "It is in the blood of Russian storytelling to take note of the fruit." And it is the nature of the American legal system – where a trial is "a contest between competing narratives" – to reward those who speak its language. Hanophy cites the New Testament in a remark addressed to Mallayev, who is Jewish. Then he sentences both defendants to life inprison.
Amazingly, Hanophy is not the most unreasonable of the people who had a hand in determining Borukhova's fate. That superlative might go to David Schnall, Michelle's legal guardian. In a long interview with Malcolm, Schnall – who despises Borukhova – reveals his belief in "ominous conspiracy theories". (The government knew about 9/11 and Katrina ahead of time, "We funded the Soviets," and so forth.) After their conversation, Malcolm – who has previously described "the 'I' character in journalism" as "almost pure invention . . . an emblematic figure, an embodiment of the idea of the dispassionate observer of life" – does something she has never done before. Notifying Borukhova's lawyer, she enters the story she is reporting as "a character who could affect its plot".
In The Journalist and the Murderer, Malcolm observed how, in comparison with fictional characters, "real people seem relatively uninteresting . . . because they are so much more complex, ambiguous, unpredictable and particular". Psychoanalysis "attempts to restore to the neurotic patient the freedom to be uninteresting . . . It proposes to undermine the novelistic structure on which he has constructed his existence." The same might be said of Malcolm's own work. The permission she grants herself in Iphigenia – the permission to step out of the role of journalist – is an example of the freedom she bestows on all her subjects. Known for its lucid ruthlessness, Malcolm's intelligence is also a generous one. By dismantling self-delusion, she liberates the self. She allows people such as Borukhova their essential human mystery, observing always the sanctity of our heart's hidden chambers, which are locked even to ourselves.
