LETHAL CASE
Brownmiller, Susan
Lethal Case WAVERLY PLACE by Susan Brownmiller Grove Press. 294 pp. $18.95. As you read this, thousands of men are battering women and children to the point of hospitalization and, in some cases,...
...Why the fuss...
...Although she urges readers not to assume that "any of the characters in this novel are accurate portraits of real people, or that the events described actually occurred," it is almost impossible not to identify her sleazy fictional lawyer, Barry Kantor, with Joel Steinberg...
...Brownmiller has done this effectively, and presumably for good reason...
...But it isn't likely to do much for the hapless women who don't even have the resources and advantages of a Hedda Nussbaum, and for the angry men who will still be beating them and their kids, spurred on by the macho posturings and random violence they see daily on television and in their dismal streets far from Waverly Place...
...While this view seems to come close to "blaming the victim," Brownmiller no doubt hopes it will also help empower women to get out of abusive situations before it is too late...
...Many theories were advanced as the bizarre details of the case were revealed...
...If men who abuse women and children (and drugs) are made accountable for their crimes, she suggests, women too must be held responsible for cooperating with the abuse...
...could have traveled the distance from people I might have known to such a nightmare, and why the ample warning signs were misper-ceived and misinterpreted by those in a position to sound the alarm...
...Revelations of gross irregularities, incompetence, and neglect by social agencies were shocking to many...
...The couple's use of cocaine gave the Just Say No crowd further evidence of the vicious-ness of drugs...
...As you read this, thousands of men are battering women and children to the point of hospitalization and, in some cases, to death...
...Her "parents" were not married...
...She has clearly done her homework—much of it absorbed from her home turf—on police and paramedic procedures, drug effects, law courts, battered women, and so on—as well as the milieu in which the Steinbergs functioned...
...Ethical and legal questions about Hedda Nussbaum's culpability were hotly debated...
...Ann Morrissett Davidon (Ann Morrissett Davidon is a writer currently working as a paralegal counselor with Women Against Abuse in Philadelphia...
...The Steinberg case—and Brownmiller's engrossing novelistic account—may sober up a few literate men and women who were snorting down the cocaine trail, and might help their peers understand better how it could happen...
...Brownmiller does not believe Nussbaum should have been offered immunity by the district attorney in exchange for her testimony against Steinberg...
...The day the child died," Brownmiller writes in her foreword, "I began to write, to imagine how the couple from my neighborhood...
...her battered, zonked Judith Winograd is a dead-ringer for Hedda Nussbaum...
...How could "our kind" of people have come to this...
...One expects educated, middle-class women who dabble in drugs and deluded men to have the power to extricate themselves, or choose not to get involved in the first place...
...Steinberg was a successful attorney, Nussbaum had been a children's-book editor at a Manhattan publishing house...
...They lived in an expensive apartment in Greenwich Village—in the vicinity, as it happened, of feminist writer Susan Brownmiller...
...Making novels—and money—out of real people's bizarre lives and tragedies seems an exploitative, ghoulish occupation...
...Only the novelist has the literary license to disguise people or amalgamate them into composites, devising their thoughts and conversations so the reader finds them both interesting and credible...
...The television image of Joel Steinberg's live-in companion, hideously battered Hedda Nussbaum, certainly enhanced the story's grisly shock effect...
...These are only the recorded ones, in only one city...
...In a New York Times op-ed piece, Brownmiller deplored what she sees as the tendency of some feminists to identify with—and to some extent excuse—Hedda Nussbaum, perpetuating "the specious notion that women are doomed to be victims of the abnormal psychology of love at all cost...
...Yet a single case of lethal battering aroused intensive media and public attention over the past year-and-a-half: the death of six-year-old Lisa Steinberg...
...According to New York City statistics, 127 children were killed by abusive adults in 1988...
...Yet real people are the subject of most writers—journalists, historians, biographers, novelists...
...she was not their biological or legally adopted daughter—it was a case like many others...
...Brownmiller, author of Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, uses her imagination well in this vivid fictionalized account of how the Steinberg tragedy might have happened...
...the history of once-bright-eyed little Melinda Kantor fits too well that of Lisa Steinberg...
...The novel is a good read, even if we know from the start its horrendous ending...
...But the most salient factor differentiating the Steinberg case from most others was that Steinberg and Nussbaum were a white, educated, upper-income couple who might have crossed paths—at a party, in an office or a restaurant—with any of the white upper- and middle-class people who rely on the social agencies, courts, police, and stratifications of incomes and neighborhoods to separate them from the uncontrolled violence, anger, and twisted values that poverty and frustration breed in the ghettos...
...If the police are called and any action taken, seldom does the case attract media coverage, even when deaths occur...
...All of which raises further questions in regard to this troubling case: How much liberty can a writer take when his or her fiction is based on people who exist or have existed...
Vol. 53 • April 1989 • No. 4
