The Body in Question

By Jill Ciment
Pantheon, 2019, 192 pages

Reviewd by Ted Streuli
August 8, 2022

“The Body in Question” is a love story for grown-ups.

Juror C-2, a 52-year-old photographer, is sequestered for 17 days at an Econo Lodge in central Florida. She falls for Juror F-17, a 41-year-old anatomy professor at the university’s medical school.

But this isn’t a girl-meets-boy flirtation that develops into a frolic and concludes with a hand-holding walk on the beach at sunset. They’re not 19, after all, and there are grown-up complications.

They are sequestered jurors for a murder trial in which the defendant, a teenage girl, is accused of immolating her 18-month-old brother in his crib. The defense suggests that her identical twin sister might be the real killer, or even the sister’s boyfriend.

The judge has forbidden discussion of the case outside the jury room, and there’s a guard on duty to make sure they don’t. He’s there at the diner at which the jury eats lunch, he’s along when they go to dinner at Outback and Red Lobster, there’s a guard when they swim in the motel pool. The motel room doors can’t be locked. Despite those precautions, Juror C-2 justifies her dalliance, telling herself the judge never insisted on celibacy.

Further complicating the affair is Juror C-2’s 86-year-old husband, a Pulitzer-winning journalist whose growing frailty is becoming a guilty burden to his much younger wife.

Ciment delivers a harsh, honest look at adult emotions. She examines C-2’s desire for a final fling before she’s too old, her conflict between desire and betrayal, and F-17’s expectations for a relationship that continues after the trial. Even more poignantly, Ciment shows us in detail what it means to get old, to have desire the body won’t accommodate, to awaken every day feeling as if it’s the morning after when there was no night before.

If “The Bridges of Madison County” is the emotional equivalent of Degas’ “Ballet Dancers in the Wings,” “The Body in Question” is Courbet’s “The Stone Breakers.” It’s a realistic picture of emotional struggle, not a soft, fuzzy, romanticized version of love.

We get old, Ciment says. We still want love. We can’t always have it.

Ciment draws on Patricia Highsmith’s short story “The Heroine,” in which a governess, seeking adoration, imperils her charge so she can be the one to save the child. Ciment references the story through the prosecution’s arguments in the courtroom, drawing a parallel to a younger generation’s desperate need for love.

Love is pain, Ciment says. Love is hopeless. We don’t care. We want it anyway. More than anything.

As much as Ciment is writing about love, she is also writing about duty, both the juror’s duty to the trial and the wife’s duty to her husband. She writes about the duty to be honest with others and oneself.

That sets up her internal struggle, of course: duty versus desire.

Ciment dissects Juror C-2, opening her up and laying her bare just as Juror F-17 cuts through his cadavers: cleanly, methodically, respectfully and under bright, harsh light.

The characters feel real in “The Body in Question.” It’s not a legal thriller told from a juror’s point of view, it’s a love story, a couple of them, really, told without the anesthesia, the way we see it at 52 and 86 when the stars in our eyes have dimmed from sparkling bursts to faintly glowing spots. Ciment forces us to confront aging and mortality with the clear-eyed realization that love among the AARP set is different from love in our roaring 20s, whether we want it that way or not.

It’s a short read, but it’s a long, uncomfortable think.