Anyone who teases me for liking the New Yorker too much would have laughed and laughed watching me at the gym the week the magazine published Janet Malcolm's murder-trial procedural "Iphigenia in Forest Hills." Malcolm is a giant of long-form narrative nonfiction. She likes mythic-sized subjects—Freud, Sylvia Plath, Gertrude Stein, the US Senate, the cruelty of journalism itself. ("Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible" is the first sentence of 1990's The Journalist and the Murderer.) Her magazine pieces, packed with icy wit and withering ethical certainty, are often just trimmed-down future books. They go on and on.
"Iphigenia in Forest Hills" is Malcolm's take on the trial of Mazoltuv Borukhova, an observant young Bukharan Jew (in Queens) who did or did not pay a hit man to murder her estranged husband after he got custody of their daughter. After 60 minutes, the bike at my gym stops automatically; it stopped, but I couldn't. The electronic menu cycled through post-workout stats, and I just kept sitting there, dripping like crazy, trying not to get sweat on the pages. Right when I was going to take a break, one of the characters, a lawyer representing the 4-year-old daughter, revealed himself to be crazy to Malcolm in a phone interview, and the way she revealed his craziness looked awesome on the page—simply a list of the crazy things he said.
"Then I did something I have never done before as a journalist," she wrote. "I meddled with the story I was reporting."
The thought of getting off the bike, showering, and walking home now seemed ridiculous, so I started pedaling again and went for another 60 minutes. (This is something I have never done before as a gym-goer.) Without giving too much away: Her reporter's notes become the basis for a motion in the trial.
Malcolm's take (now a book of the same name) is moody, judgmental, and vicious toward idiots—which makes it excellent fun to read, if depressing, since the idiots have the power. Her reading of the trial illuminates all sorts of indignities and slights Borukhova suffers that a male reporter might not notice. Her genius for detail lights up characters from within. One lawyer she's not terribly fond of is "a short, plump man with a mustache, who walks with the quick darting movements of a bantam cock and has a remarkably high voice, almost like a woman's." The judge, whom Malcolm can't stand, is "a man of seventy-four with a small head and a large body and the faux-genial manner that American petty tyrants cultivate." And Borukhova looks "like a captive barbarian princess in a Roman triumphal procession." Borukhova is going down in flames, but she's blessed with Malcolm's sympathies. 
