[In the following review, Vachss criticizes Waverly Place for failing to address the link between spousal abuse and child abuse.]

Journalists report facts. Politicians spin facts. Novelists spin yarns. The aims and constraints of these varied professions interact and overlap when a novel is used as the vehicle for the subsurface explanation of events that capture the public's fancy. Or its revulsion.

A novelist is permitted, even expected, to relate the narrative from a social-political perspective. Thus, if the novelist believes that poverty is the root cause of crime, he or she writes from that belief. This is morally and ethically acceptable—novels may be designed to persuade as much as to entertain.

Lisa Steinberg's death was national news, not because she was a child when she died, not because her death appeared to be at the hands of her caretakers, but because those charged with her murder occupied a social and economic position miles above the underclass. An apparently successful lawyer, a former children's book editor, a Greenwich Village brownstone. “How does such a thing happen?” was not on the lips of the American public. No, it was “How does such a thing happen here?”

In Waverly Place, Susan Brownmiller, author of Against Our Will and Femininity has written a fictionalized interpretation of the Lisa Steinberg homicide and its precipitating events. The main characters—Barry Kantor, Judith Winograd and Melanie—are thinly disguised versions of Joel Steinberg, Hedda Nussbaum and their adopted daughter Lisa. The sequences are essentially factual: the 911 calls about domestic violence, the reports to the Child Abuse Hotline (and the subsequent investigations that determined the allegations of abuse/neglect to be “unfounded”), the bogus “adoptions” of the child and her younger brother, the visible bruises on the child well before her death, the role of the child's own school in the tragedy. Brownmiller's novel, her first, attempts to answer America's questions: How could this happen? How could this happen with such people involved?

The answer, in short form, is that Brownmiller sees wife battering and child abuse as inextricably intertwined. Kantor is the Devil. Except for some vague hints that he himself was battered as a child (and such hints come from the mouth of a man to whom lying is the staff of life), Kantor is depicted as a controlling, sadistic, evil creature. He is a possession-crazed yuppie, a corner-cutter unencumbered by morals or ethics, a cocaine dealer who works as an (incompetent) criminal lawyer and steals from his clients. The child is “adopted” by accident. Kantor is involved in a baby-selling operation, and gets “stuck” with the child when a prospective deal falls through. When he finally melts down and destroys the child in a series of escalating physical attacks, it is the combination of cocaine psychosis and the stock market crash that drives him to critical mass. Two self-inflicted wounds. Kantor is a snake-charmer fatally bitten by his pets.

Judith is the classic battered woman, manipulated by a sociopathic monster, so diminished of self-concept that she sees it all as “my fault.” No opportunity to make this point is overlooked, from references to “Stockholm Syndrome” and Svengali to the child pathetically wishing her mother would be “good” so Daddy wouldn't have to beat her. Judith is beaten horribly, escapes, and voluntarily returns to promises of love and devotion. Over and over again. Her will is eroded until it vanishes: No cult could have accomplished a more effective brainwashing. The end is inevitable. Brownmiller calls the tragedy of the child's death folie à deux, but Judith's contribution to the result is buried under thick layers of sympathy and empathy for her position as Battered Wife.

Such a position should not be trivialized, and Brownmiller writes with justifiable passion. Her heat sheds light on a cancer within our society, but questions remain. If the case workers, the school authorities, the neighbors—if all of us—must share the responsibility for Melanie's death, can Judith herself really be so blameless? If this book points toward the desperate need for a child protective emphasis within the battered women's movement, it will have been one of the most significant opening salvos in a war that has yet to be declared.