The Body in Question by Jill Ciment

A murder trial, a book review and the fraught question of serving on juries

I’ve been called for jury duty two times. The first time was pretty routine. I sat in a crowded room for a day before being told I could go home and didn’t have to come back. The second time, a clerk told us they were selecting a jury for a murder trial, a complex case with two defendants that could take as long as three weeks. Many panic-stricken faces. But I felt I had a civic duty and in any case was between film jobs, so I didn’t try to get out of it.

Eventually I found myself called into the courtroom, where the judge stressed the seriousness of being on a jury and asked about my willingness to serve. This was back in the day when both the defense and the Crown—the prosecutor, in this case a woman—could each summarily challenge a number of potential jurors and have them dismissed. After I agreed to serve, the defense accepted me for the jury. But the Crown looked me over, objected, and once again I was sent home.

“She probably thought you looked too arty,” my brother said afterwards, a Crown attorney himself. Thinking about it: “I would have picked you.”

In fact, I was intrigued by both the murder itself and the process. I went to court whenever I could, taking a seat on the hard wooden visitors bench and watching the case unfold. My brother was right: I probably would have voted to convict. But I was just as glad I wasn’t chosen for the jury, since the trial lasted six weeks, and I wouldn’t have wanted to be there every day.

All this means that when I heard about Jill Ciment’s latest novel, The Body in Question, I ran out to get it. The book centres on a murder trial, but it isn’t a John Grisham-style thriller about dueling lawyers. Instead, it’s set among jury members in a domestic murder case in Florida. The main character, Hannah, is known through most of the novel by her jury number, C-2. She’s a photographer with a history of glamourous assignments, photographing rock stars for Rolling Stone. Yet at 52, she’s retreated from the glitz to photograph animals and, increasingly, take care of her much older husband, who is in his 80s.

Impanelled on one of Florida’s six-person juries (plus alternate), C-2 meets F-17, who is eleven years younger than she is, a medical doctor and a professor of pathology. Looking for what she thinks of as one last fling, C-2 starts a thoroughly verboten affair with the thoroughly receptive doctor, fraternizing as jury members must not do. They’re sequestered in a motel with the other jurors during the complex trial, making it easy for them to slip in and out of each other’s rooms. Yet the proximity of other jury members means they’re also liable to get caught.

Dancing from the background to the foreground of the story is the complicated murder case. On trial for murder is one of a pair of twin girls, teenagers who were adopted by their American parents as children from a Romanian orphanage, where their early years were brutal. One of the girls is withdrawn and probably autistic. The other is more popular and sociable but also, just maybe, sociopathic and controlling.

Not long before the story opens, their parents have a late and unexpected baby, a boy who dies in a fire that’s soon proven to be arson. The withdrawn girl is arrested in his death. The prosecution alleges that she set the fire in order to rescue the baby and reap praise for her heroism. Unfortunately she overdid it with the kerosine and the fire got out of hand. The defense argues that her sister was the one to set the fire, again to play heroine, and either persuaded or blackmailed her sister into taking the blame after the baby died.

Ciment is less interested in the traditional whodunnit than in the way the jury reaches its decision—the way we all reach decisions—which in her telling, isn’t pretty. C-2 looks over the shoulders of other jury members in court as they absentmindedly doodle pictures in their notebooks while not listening to the testimony. She watches one woman repeatedly fall asleep in the jury box, unable to stay awake after a bout of back pain that led to a sleepless night. When the judge summarily dismisses the sleeper, the alternate becomes a full juror, and not a very collegial one. A snoop with a mean streak, he likes to set one juror against another.

More subtle, and punitive, are the problems that arise between C-2 and her lover, F-17. When they finally begin their deliberations, it turns out the two differ radically in their idea of what happened. By this time, C-12 wants to break off their affair, feeling guilty about betraying her husband. F-17 is hurt by her withdrawal, and uses the deliberations to take his revenge. And here lies one of Ciment’s central concerns: the extent to which a jury’s verdict is influenced by purely personal matters. Throughout her very good novel, she subtly asks whether jurors can ever escape their own failings—their absentminded boredom, their religious and political biases, their small meannesses, large prejudices and debilitating backaches—to render an impartial verdict. Also whether they bumble towards one anyway.

A friend of mine was on a jury earlier this year. She can’t talk about their deliberations and hasn’t. I don’t know what the case was about, who was charged with what and whether or not the jury found them guilty. But one day when we were for a walk, she spoke about how hard it had been to try to understand the motives not just of the accused, but of the witnesses. She said some of them seemed to be trying to keep certain pieces of personal information from coming out in public, many of which she thought probably had nothing to do with the case. Often the information they were forced to reveal proved banal, although not all of it, and altogether this made it hard for the jury to get a complete picture of what the witness had seen or known.

Of course it was the job of both the defense lawyer and the Crown attorney to try to hack away at their small lies and evasions, but she thought that one of the lawyers made a bad job of it. She told me this meant she found it hard to figure out what had really gone on, although she tried. She also felt that some of the other jurors tried so hard they got mired in details and lost sight of the big picture. On our walk, she was describing another flawed process, although in the end she felt the jury had reached the right verdict.

Ciment’s novel revolves around questions like these, of reliability and unreliability, and who can be trusted to do what they’ve promised. But of course it centres on a murder and an affair, and guilt lies at its core. After the jury delivers its verdict, C-2 turns back into Hannah and goes home, where her husband soon learns to his great anguish that she’s had an affair with another juror. (No spoiler. This is printed on the jacket flap.) Hannah feels crushingly guilty, especially when her elderly husband receives a bad diagnosis—one that the former F-17, her lover Graham, is uniquely placed to help them cope with.

Jill Ciment began an affair in 1970 with her college art teacher, Arnold Mesches, when she was 17 and he was 47, a married man with two children. He quickly divorced and they married a year later, staying together until he died in 2016 at the age of 93. Ciment has written two memoirs about their long marriage, publishing the first in 1996 when Mesches was still alive. Earlier this year, after both his death and the rise of the Me Too Movement, Ciment re-examined their thirty-year age gap in a second memoir, Consent.

Now she’s written a novel where the protagonist is thirty years younger than her husband. Since I’m writing a newsletter about research, it’s worth noting that it’s valuable for a writer to live a life that is in some respects unusual. She’s able to mine her off-the-grid experiences to create equally-unusual relationships, providing both details and insights that she’s peculiarly able to explore, and which keep readers turning the page. Reading Ciment’s novel in the context of her biography, I remembered when I was a 17-year-old university student myself. My creative writing prof, to whom I was emphatically not attracted (hairy toes in sandals) rather portentously passed on the old chestnut, “Write what you know.” I have a very clear memory of thinking, “Gee, I’d better live an interesting life so I’ve got something to write about.”

I wasn’t wrong, although being 17, I didn’t quite understand that what others might think of as a quiet life can be as interesting as bashing off into the Amazon, at least when it’s examined off-kilter.

I have no idea what aspects of her marriage Ciment has fictionalized in The Body in Question and what she has written a bit more verbatim. Nor do I know whether she has ever served on a jury, although of course jury duty is easier to research. I’m almost finished reading Orbital, Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-winning novel about six astronauts on board a space station. Harvey is brilliant at conveying what it’s like to be up there, but she’s never rocketed into space herself. Instead, in her acknowledgments, she thanks both NASA and the European Space Agency for the wealth of information they provided. I also have an idea that as a teacher, she’s found herself trapped in a room with some rather disparate people. So there’s that, too.

Personal experience + research help = a great formula for writing fiction, at least when both types of research are folded seamlessly into the story. In The Body in Question, Jill Ciment has written a subtle yet rivetting murder mystery that isn’t about murder, not exactly, but about being human and getting lost. Her murderer is only human, her jury is, her judge is, the lawyers are. They could be us. And aren’t we unpredictable and infuriating and admirable? All within the course of an ordinary day.

You can get Jill Ciment’s novel, The Body in Question, here.