Jill Ciment’s The Body in Question is a difficult novel to categorize, especially at its start. A 52-year old woman in Florida becomes a member of a 6-person jury on a murder case. (Apparently, in Florida, the storied 12-person jury is only required for cases where the defendant might get life imprisonment or a death sentence). Is this going to be a procedural thriller with twists and turns as evidence is laid out? A courtroom drama with grandstanding lawyers? Will it be a psychological analysis of the personalities of the jurors and the rationales behind their decisions? Or is it a novel about the protagonist’s life before, during and after the trial?
In the first half of the novel, the jurors are referred to by their numbers. The protagonist is C-2, and during jury selection she flirts with F-17, a 42-year-old anatomy professor at the local university. Both end up on the jury, and their flirtation deepens. F-17 is unmarried, but C-2 has a husband: an 87-year-old journalism professor with health problems. The trial may take up to three weeks.
The case they are called upon to decide is the horrific death of an infant. (Ciment does not skip over the details, but they are clearly not the focus of the book and are not dwelled upon.) The infant’s older adopted sibling Anca is charged with the murder. Anca and her twin sister Stephana were adopted from a Romanian orphanage, and while Stephana seems reasonably unscathed by her early years, Anca is autistic, withdrawn and largely unresponsive. Was Anca really responsible for the murder? Or has she always been a tool used by Stephana? Meanwhile an American-style media circus develops around the case: avid seniors are bused in daily to watch the proceedings, and the case is all over the news. The public, it turns out, knows more about the case than the jurors, who hear only the evidence that is presented in court.
The jury is sequestered in an Econolodge. There are two policemen in attendance, and the rules are that jurors should not have unmonitored conversations or meetings. C-2 and F-17 are often outside pretending to smoke (a pretence that becomes reality), then sneaking into each other’s rooms at night, but their relationship is obvious to the other jurors.
The different aspects of the story — the case under question, and the relationships between the jurors — are excellently interwoven, so that the reader follows the threads with equal fascination. Much is left undescribed: the readers too get only the information that is presented in court. Why was the troubled Anca left in charge of the infant and house when there were two parents around? Why does she have several dogs in kennels? At some point it becomes obvious that the details of the crime are not at all the point of the novel.
The writing is spare, intelligent, detached, and appealingly non-judgemental. C-2’s marriage to a man three decades older than herself is described unemotionally. That she chose not to have children is merely mentioned, not analyzed.
She met her husband when she was twenty-four and he was fifty-seven. He was a Pulitzer-winning journalist and she had just given up portraiture for something more dangerous.
Now his increasing health issues are beginning to change their lives.
If -C-2 is sequestered, she will only have to take care of herself — a much-needed respite justified by civic duty.
and the relationship with F-17 is likewise stated baldly, without justification, and without any suggestion that this is a Bridges-of-Madison-County scenario with a deep forever love.
Before she was too old, she wanted to have one last dalliance.
Three weeks later the trial is over. This, I thought, was where the book came into its own: the complex aftermath of the trial. Many readers might be surprised by how intriguing this second section is, quite different from the first.
Suddenly the characters have real names. They are no longer in the bubble of the Econo Lodge. Hannah (C-2) is back in real life, but her husband is sicker, she still lusts after Gordon (F-17), and the news media is having a field day with the verdict. The jurors’ names may be released, and this may change all their lives.
Ciment’s pacing is excellent. The long trial keeps the reader focused, but there is no let-down in Part 2. This tightly plotted and written novel appears to be about one trial, but actually examines issues of ethics, morality, the American legal system, and the media circus, leaving the reader to make their own judgement.
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