Staff Pick
No one knows why the defendant murdered her younger brother. And juror C-2 isn't sure why she is so drawn to juror F-17, she isn't looking for anything outside her marriage. But as they go back and forth between the courtroom and the budget motel where they are sequestered, it isn't long before they start having an affair. It should be jarring, all the competing elements of the story: the gruesome trial details, the painfully sterile locales, the furtive and vivid passion that transforms the narrator's life. Collectively though, they had the opposite effect and I felt lulled into the same liminal space the characters occupy. In this in-between place, Ciment raises interesting questions about motive, complicity, and culpability — courtroom terms, but ones that have a place in our everyday lives. The Body in Question is a meticulously crafted, subversive little book and it has quietly haunted me since I finished it. Recommended By Lauren P., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
From the author of
Heroic Measures ("Smart and funny and completely surprising . . . I loved every page" --Ann Patchett),
Act of God ("A feat of literary magic"--
Booklist) and, with Amy Hempel,
The Hand That Feeds You ("An unnerving, elegant page-turner" --
Vanity Fair), a spare, masterful novel.
The place: central Florida. The situation: a sensational murder trial, set in a courthouse more Soviet than Le Corbusier; a rich, white teenage girl--a twin--on trial for murdering her toddler brother.
Two of the jurors: Hannah, a married fifty-two-year-old former Rolling Stone and Interview Magazine photographer of rock stars and socialites (she began to photograph animals when she realized she saw people "as a species"), and Graham, a forty-one-year-old anatomy professor. Both are sequestered (she, juror C-2; he, F-17) along with the other jurors at the Econo Lodge off I-75. As the shocking and numbing details of the crime are revealed during a string of days and courtroom hours, and the nights play out in a series of court-financed meals at Outback Steak House (the state isn't paying for their drinks) and Red Lobster, Hannah and Graham fall into a furtive affair, keeping their oath as jurors never to discuss the trial. During deliberations the lovers learn that they are on opposing sides of the case. Suddenly they look at one another through an altogether different lens, as things become more complicated . . .
After the verdict, Hannah returns home to her much older husband, but the case ignites once again and Hannah's "one last dalliance before she is too old" takes on profoundly personal and moral consequences as The Body in Question moves to its affecting, powerful, and surprising conclusion.
Synopsis
*** NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR *** From the author of Heroic Measures ("Smart and funny and completely surprising . . . I loved every page" --Ann Patchett), Act of God ("A feat of literary magic"--Booklist) and, with Amy Hempel, The Hand That Feeds You ("An unnerving, elegant page-turner" --Vanity Fair), a spare, masterful novel.
The place: central Florida. The situation: a sensational murder trial, set in a courthouse more Soviet than Le Corbusier; a rich, white teenage girl--a twin--on trial for murdering her toddler brother.
Two of the jurors: Hannah, a married fifty-two-year-old former Rolling Stone and Interview Magazine photographer of rock stars and socialites (she began to photograph animals when she realized she saw people "as a species"), and Graham, a forty-one-year-old anatomy professor. Both are sequestered (she, juror C-2; he, F-17) along with the other jurors at the Econo Lodge off I-75. As the shocking and numbing details of the crime are revealed during a string of days and courtroom hours, and the nights play out in a series of court-financed meals at Outback Steak House (the state isn't paying for their drinks) and Red Lobster, Hannah and Graham fall into a furtive affair, keeping their oath as jurors never to discuss the trial. During deliberations the lovers learn that they are on opposing sides of the case. Suddenly they look at one another through an altogether different lens, as things become more complicated . . .
After the verdict, Hannah returns home to her much older husband, but the case ignites once again and Hannah's "one last dalliance before she is too old" takes on profoundly personal and moral consequences as The Body in Question moves to its affecting, powerful, and surprising conclusion.