"Merely kinky"? How about stunningly outrageous?
It's taken me weeks to make my way through what has to be the longest article ever published in the New Yorker- Janet Malcolm's Iphigenia in Forest Hills, from the May 3rd, 2010 issue. At 28 pages, minus cartoons, it's mammoth even by New Yorker standards. However, what kept me reading was the expectation of a twist eventually making its way into the narrative. The twist never comes, but I kept reading to the conclusion because of the sheer weirdness of the murder-for-hire trial it documents.
Shortly into it I thought to myself, this must be the most poorly-written piece I've ever encountered in this magazine. Now for me, the thought of finding anything poorly written in the NYer is a surprise, even though some of the "Shouts and Murmers" columns often fail to amuse me. But that's humor, and humor is a fickle thing. The writing in the NYer is almost uniformly excellent, though once in awhile (rarely, actually) I do find a sentence of dubious grammar. The poor quality of the writing in Malcolm's piece kept nagging at me though, with it's neither third nor first person narrative, detours into a collective omniscience and its 20 chapter length. There is just something off about it.
Then came the shocker, which made me want to go back to every issue since and check if anyone had commented on a sentence which appears in the article. The sentence stunned me. I read it twice. I read it a third time. And then I wondered how the hell it made it into print and that in the two months since the publication of this article I haven't heard nor read a single word about it.
What is the sentence?
It's surrounded by a loaded question and a distinctly presumptuous conclusion. Read this, which appears on page 55:
Here we come to another of the questions about Borukhova that blur her portrait
and give it its strange tinge. Why did she keep harping on the sexual abuse? If Daniel's "grave misconduct directed at the vagina of his young daughter" (or what Fass [Borukhova's attorney] called "inappropriate touching") actually occurred, it surely wasn't the cause of the child's fear of him - it was merely kinky. It would have served Borukhova better - it would have been rational and logical - to connect Michelle's fearful, clinging behavior during the visits to scary scenes of domestic violence.
The story is about the murder trial of Marina Borukhova, who was found guilty of conspiracy to have her husband murdered when she lost custody of her young daughter during divorce proceedings. Now yes, I have been super busy these past couple of months and way behind all the news and 2nd tier stories, but how has this comment not prompted any outrage? Have I missed it? Did it not happen? The Western world almost collapsed when one line from the long sermon of a fiery preacher was taken out context, creating a media maelstrom that almost derailed an entire presidential campaign. Yet here is one of the most respected magazines in the country, indeed my very favorite magazine, tacitly stating that the sexual abuse of a child wouldn't cause the child to fear an adult- it's "merely kinky"?
God damn America, what the hell is going on? And what the hell is going on with my formatting for this post? Sorry, but I couldn't figure out how to fix it. I hate Blogger sometimes.
The photo from the court room is by James Messerschmidt/Polaris.