The Deadhouse
By Linda Fairstain
(Scribner, 2001 — 411 pages)
Reviewed by Ina R. Bort
From the New York Law Journal
December 12, 2001
If those weighty headlines about Kandahar and anthrax just aren't grabbing your attention the way they used to, it may be your time to reach for The Deadhouse.
The latest and lightest novel by "the national best selling author" also known as the head of the sex crimes division of the Manhattan D.A.'s office, centers around the mysterious murder of Lola Dakota, the King's College history professor who everyone loves to hate. At the time of her death by strangulation, Dakota — recently divorced from her physically abusive husband — had been immersed in a research project about Roosevelt Island. Many of her faculty colleagues at King's College, an experimental university on New York's upper west side, were also involved in the project. They, along with Dakota's ex-husband, are the leading murder suspects.
Homicide, betrayal, attorney misconduct, intrigue, sex, and hidden treasure — you'll get it all in The Deadhouse. Surprisingly enough, you'll also get a good dose of interesting information about Roosevelt Island.
The island, most recently Mr. Bloomberg's proposed building site for new public schools, was originally known as Blackwell's Island. In the 19th century it served as a receptacle for the city's "undesirables": the mentally ill, lepers, cripples, cholera and typhus victims, and individuals afflicted with smallpox and scarlet fever. By the 1870's almost a dozen medical facilities were located there. Fairstein vividly describes how "the afflicted were loaded onto boats to bring them over to the hospitals," most of them knowing that they were on a one-way trip.
The island was also the site of Blackwell's Penitentiary, erected in 1832. The facility housed nearly a thousand inmates, most of them serving sentences for misdemeanors. The horrible overcrowding, drug-dealing and corruption that ran rampant through the facility triggered some reforms in the early 1900's, including the renaming of the island, in 1921, to the happier-sounding Welfare Island. When those reforms proved ineffectual, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia's Correction Commissioner, Austin MacCormick, led a raid on the penitentiary to expose conditions in 1934. This led to the removal of all the inmates from this island to another: Rikers. Don't worry, though - these educational snapshots of our city's history appear only intermittently throughout the book. Fairstein devotes much more of her effort to detailed descriptions of the life and times of the story's heroine, Alexandra Cooper.
Alexandra, the heroine of Fairstein's earlier novels as well, is Fairstein's cosmetically altered-ego. That is to say, she is the woman that Fairstein longs to be (or, a more frightening possibility: thinks she actually is). She just happens to be the head of the sex crimes division of the Manhattan D.A.'s office. She just happens to be blonde, just happens to have graduated from Vassar and the University of Virginia Law School, and just happens to live on the Upper East Side and have a summer home on Martha's Vineyard. Sound familiar? (If not, check the book jacket's description of the author).
But here's where the lines between art and life become blurred: Alexandra also just happens to be five-foot-ten and weigh 115 pounds. And references to her physique — and the herculean efforts required to maintain it — abound. While at dinner one evening with Jake, her babe newscaster boyfriend, Alexandra tells us that "Jake devoured his steak while I swiped a few of his perfect pommes frites to go along with my soup and salad." A co-worker tactfully describes her as "too skinny for [his] tastes." And the cliffhanger (well, boulder-hanger, anyway) ending provides Fairstein plenty of opportunities to remind us of her protagonist's wispy frame. While attempting to escape from a certain evil fellow who has kidnapped her and brought her to Roosevelt Island, Alexandra makes a desperate dash over a thin layer of ice for a rocky archipelago at the island's tip, thinking that "the more than 80 pounds that separated . . . [her] weight" from her pursuer's would inure to her benefit. Amidst the frenzy of her adventures, she finds the time to tell us that the rock that she's aiming for "seemed secure, so I pulled myself forward, balancing my one hundred fifteen pounds on either side of the crest."
As you may have sensed at this point, these references to Alex's weight are gratuitous, at best. At worst they are distressing reminders of our culture's — and Linda Fairstein's — unhealthy obsession with being thin. Indeed, anyone who is 5'10" and 115 pounds is more likely equipped to be on the receiving end of an intravenous tube than running around Roosevelt Island and solving murder cases.
It's a shame, really, that Fairstein feels the need to bring such attention to her leading lady's physical appearance. Given her national prominence as a prosecutor, and her semi-competence as a storyteller, Fairstein is going to sell books. Since the books she has chosen to write are supposedly fictional anyway, Fairstein could easily use them as a vehicle to create — perhaps even advocate?? — a world where the size and shape of a woman bear no relationship to her professional success. Instead, Fairstein simply infuses her novels with the same sad message that permeates the pages of fashion magazines and television commercials: size matters. Coming from Vogue or Cosmopolitan, it is predictable. But coming from Fairstein — perhaps one of the most successful woman attorneys in the United States — it is a disappointment.
