[In the following review, Caputi comments that Waverly Place is less powerful and effective than accounts of the real-life circumstances of the Steinberg murder case reported by the news media.]

On November 1st, 1987, six-year-old Lisa Steinberg was brought to a hospital emergency room, unconscious and with injuries which led to her death four days later. The two people who had been raising her in their Waverly Place, Greenwich Village apartment—Joel Steinberg, a con artist and lawyer who had illegally adopted the child, and Hedda Nussbaum, the former children's book editor he lived with and battered for some twelve years—were brought in by the police for questioning. At first both were charged with second-degree murder, but the prosecution later dropped the charges against Nussbaum so that she could become the state's key witness. The trial was televised and for seven days Nussbaum told of her abusive relationship with Steinberg; videotapes of her extensively damaged body were introduced as evidence. On January 30th, 1989, Steinberg was convicted of a lesser charge, first-degree manslaughter in the death of Lisa Steinberg.

Four books based on the case that became America's number one media event have already been contracted and a number of others are reported to be in the offing. Susan Brownmiller, author of the classic Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (1975) as well as Femininity (1984), finished Waverly Place before the outcome of the Steinberg murder trial, yet “Barry Kantor,” Brownmiller's fictionalized Steinberg, is presumed guilty here. Her focus is not on who did what, but on the personalities of Kantor and “Judith Winograd,” whose story, as Brownmiller writes in her introduction, illustrates “a thousand case histories and clinical studies of family violence.”

Waverly Place begins with the comatose child “Melinda” being brought to the emergency room and her subsequent death. After that brief opening, the rest is told in flashback, beginning with Kantor and Winograd's first meeting and concluding with the night of Melinda's murder.

For its type—the popular crime novel—Waverly Place is a creditable piece. In the introduction Brownmiller explains that she has opted to write fiction because she “wanted the freedom to invent dialogue, motivations, events, and characters based on my own understanding of battery and abuse.” Particularly in her treatment of the three main characters, Brownmiller is fairly convincing. She hits all the right nerves of recognition and genuine creepiness in her portrait of the consummate user/abuser, Barry Kantor, a man who, through his ability to tap into others' emptiness, is able to overpower psychologically a variety of clients, associates, doctors and, of course, his lover Judith Winograd.

The character of Winograd is developed as a very feminine woman with the deep and dreadful insecurities (about looks, intelligence, marriageability) that go with the territory, a woman who wanted to be taken, body and soul, by her man. In one scene, Barry has recently introduced Judith to smoking cocaine (a substance which Steinberg and Nussbaum habitually abused and which figured in the violence and neglect causing Lisa's death). In Judith's mind,

He was like lava running down a mountainside, a hot stream of words flowing faster, faster, gathering speed … I stood in the path of the molten lava. I was encircled by lava, I craved its warmth. I crawled on my knees through the gravel toward the molten source, stretching my hands, my tongue toward the heat. I was enveloped in lava, I spoke the language, the torrent of words came faster. And then it veered.

He stood up and stretched. “What time is it? I'm going to sleep.”

(p. 85)

In scenes such as this, Brownmiller fulfills her goal. Ultimately, however, the novel does not move beyond a mere reworking of events, with the actual occurrences far more vivid than Brownmiller's reconstructions. For example, one of the reasons suspicion was first directed at Steinberg was that on being told his daughter had suffered at the very least “permanent brain damage,” he joked to a doctor that “Lisa would never be an Olympic athlete” and then settled down to watch a football game. In a parallel Waverly Place scene, Brownmiller has a cold though garrulous Kantor accompany the medics into the Emergency Room. Then: “Most people get hysterical … This guy's acting like he turned in a broken appliance. I have been in the presence of evil, the paramedic thought as he left the ER.” In this case, Steinberg's own words and actions speak much louder than Brownmiller's.

Crucial components of the novel do not move beyond a reiteration of formulaic cliché. Brownmiller “explains” Kantor's violence by making him a battered child, son of an abusive father and a grim and narrow mother. Of course some boys who are physically abused grow up to be abusers, but this is often used as a too tidy explanation of male battery in popular fiction and nonfiction. In Waverly Place it lacks both imaginative and explanatory value. How much more illuminating it might have been if Brownmiller's estimable acumen were focused on Joel Steinberg's formative influences, both personal and cultural.

The side characters in Waverly Place are largely one-dimensional, serving primarily to exemplify the reluctance of outsiders to intervene in domestic abuse. I was surprised to find no character who provided a point of view that might represent the thoughts of the author; Waverly Place might have been stronger had Brownmiller provided that perspective. In a recent editorial in the New York Times (February 2nd, 1989), Brownmiller argues that Nussbaum, despite the years of battery, still bore responsibility as a participant in her own and Lisa's destruction. Indeed, much post-trial feminist discussion has dwelled, I think wrong-headedly, upon Hedda Nussbaum's possible culpability—another case of blaming the victim—while Steinberg, the actual abuser and slayer, gets lost in the fury of conflicting and painful emotions. Yet readers who hope to find a further exposition of this controversial argument in Waverly Place will be disappointed.

In her novel, Brownmiller definitely focuses the blame on Kantor. Characters who do argue for Winograd's responsibility are themselves discredited by their own words and actions. Marianna, the TV journalist who lives in the same building on Waverly Place, condemns Winograd as a “moral zombie,” a woman with education and options who nonetheless chose to remain in Kantor's thrall. Marianna does so, however, at a chic and superficial dinner party while reaching for the Pouilly Fuissé. Moreover, Marianna herself only once halfheartedly placed a call to a social service agency; after this she ignored the abusive situation in the apartment above her.

As is, the novel does seem to absolve Winograd because of her extreme victimization by Kantor. Some time before Kantor started to beat Melinda, Winograd had tried to leave him. She tells him, “Something's wrong with me Barry … I'm losing ground. Little things scare me that didn't used to, I get afraid on the street, I can't write anymore. I don't understand what's happening.” He replies, “Where will you go? What will you do? Take a good look at yourself, sweetheart, when was the last time you held a job?” After this it's all downhill, and soon Winograd has deteriorated to such an extent (she starts seeking secret messages in neighborhood graffiti) that she seems no longer completely sane and really quite beyond responsibility.

The nagging question of Nussbaum's responsibility is addressed both directly and indirectly (that is, wrapped in typical media doublethink) in “Hedda's Story,” a recent cover feature in People magazine (February 13th, 1989). Here Nussbaum is presented as the largely helpless victim of a sadistic madman. We are told in great detail of the horrors of Steinberg's abuse—more extensive and bizarre than Brownmiller depicts in the novel:

Steinberg had kicked her in the eye, strangled her, beaten her sexual organs, urinated on her, hung her in handcuffs from a chinning bar, lacerated a tear duct by poking his finger in the corner of her eye, broken her nose several times and pulled out clumps of hair while throwing her about their apartment. “Sometimes he'd take the blowtorch we used for freebasing and move it around me, making me jump … I have burn marks all over my body from that. Joel told me he did this to improve my coordination.”

This last quote from Nussbaum is reiterated in a blown-up section on the left side of a two-page spread. On the right is an advertisement for Neutrogena soap. It features a large photo of a grinning woman, Cathy Guisewite, cartoonist, creator of “Cathy,®” as well as a highlighted quote from the woman herself:

I know all about eating a cheesecake after a bad date. People say, “You know exactly how I feel; I'm so relieved that somebody else sits in the closet and eats a cheesecake after a bad date.” I think I verbalize for a lot of women the anxieties and insecurities we live out every day, like I'll buy anything that will promise me a miracle … I always go back to Neutrogena Soap, because it's so simple. I mean, I stagger into the bathroom, I wash my face, and I can handle it. It's the one thing I don't have to torture myself about.

It is important to realize that in a media package such as People magazine, articles and ads are arranged in a flow sequence for a cumulative effect. Consider the basic message that this juxtaposition of article and ad delivers. Key themes are torture, feminine insecurities, anxieties and masochism. We move from a graphic description of the torture of a former successful career woman (Nussbaum) to the smiling confession of egregious self-torture by a current career woman (Guisewite). (We might also note that Guisewite's torture can be traced to an abusive man, the “bad date” for whom she locked herself in a closet.) Moreover, after reading “Hedda's story,” including its mention of the six times Hedda left Joel Steinberg (the lifelong “bad date”) only to return, what can we make of these strategically placed words of Guisewite? “I always go back … because it's so simple. I mean, I stagger into the bathroom, I wash my face, and I can handle it.”

While Nussbaum's torture by a man she continued to live with is appalling (though fascinating enough to rivet the nation), Guisewite's self-torment is pitched as normal, representative and smilingly cute. In Brownmiller's New York Times editorial, she castigated some women's typical “feminine identification” with Hedda Nussbaum as both “simplistic and alarming.” In People we find a subliminal advocacy of precisely that same feminine identification with masochism. Though the article superficially abhors Nussbaum's battery (all the while describing it in titillating detail), the entire media package subtextually attempts to instill in women the very attitudes which allow battery.

I had originally picked up the People magazine because after reading Waverly Place I wanted very much to know more about the case and its actual personae—what Nussbaum's and Steinberg's families actually had been like, the psychologistics of Steinberg's control of Nussbaum … I found these, potentially, more persuasive than Brownmiller's (or possibly anyone's) fictional account.

Which brings me to my central question. Why bother fictionalizing a case that has gotten so much publicity that its central characters have become national symbols? One argument is that the popular form will bring greater readership and exposure to the feminist viewpoint, that is, a perspective that recognizes battery as an institutionalized form of patriarchal force. Indeed, Waverly Place is a Literary Guild main selection. It is being serialized in Ladies' Home Journal and has been optioned as a possible feature film. However, if the viewpoint is not so richly expressed in the fictional form, that argument loses ground. Moreover, ideas in feminist nonfiction books do filter into the mainstream culture and have influenced not only common attitudes but also a number of popular novels, films and docudramas. Brownmiller's own Against Our Will is one of the best examples of this.

Another argument suggests that fictionalization allows for greater scope of inquiry. Ultimately, however, Waverly Place doesn't transcend the events but is more like a transparency lifted off them. In her depiction of the abusive relationship, particularly her canny portrayal of the seemingly dreamy though actually demon lover, Barry Kantor, Brownmiller may well provide insight to those who have not previously confronted the dynamics of battery. But for those readers who want a more complex rendering, this novel haunts but does not always illuminate.