Volume 46, Number 6 · April 8, 1999
The Case of the Canned Lawyer
By Joyce Carol Oates
The Crime of Sheila McGough
by Janet Malcolm
Knopf, 164 pp., $22.00
Just as The Journalist and the Murderer (1990) was a provocative, and provoking, meditation upon the ambiguous ethical role of the journalist vis-à-vis his subject, and The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1995) was an equally original meditation upon the complicated art of biography ('the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world'), so Janet Malcolm's seventh book, The Crime of Sheila McGough, is both a highly detailed portrait of a woman lawyer and the court case with which she is involved, and an intensely personal and critical examination of law in contemporary America.
Review, 3567 words
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