The Body in Question by Jill Ciment
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Briefly touted on PBS Newshour as an outstanding book for the summer, it piqued my interest and I was completely unfamiliar with the author. I’m impressed. This is not your typical “courtroom drama.” The case being tried is almost a vague backdrop, and the verdict is almost peripheral – this in spite of the fact that the only people who have names in the first half are the defendant and her family – none of jurors or court personnel do. The drama is between two of sequestered jurors who have an affair, tiptoeing into each other’s motel rooms, thinking no one notices. They do, of course. Everyone does. What Ciment does so masterfully is to explore the complexities of guilt, shame, responsibility, knowledge, deceit, truth… who knows what, when, and about whom. C-2 (the woman juror) is a photographer, and she alone has a sense of how what one is allowed to see can be manipulated, falsified, distorted, truncated. Ironically, the sequestration means that the people who actually know the least about what really happened are the jurors. And the people who seem to know the least about each other are the lovers.
Deftly written, unsparing in its look at the washes of emotion in a long marriage, the anguish and regret of infidelity, the guilt of failing to resist temptation, and the sorrow of a final loss, this is way more than a courtroom drama. I will read more by this writer.
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