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Novelists 'R' Us By Laura Miller Are writing schools ruining American literature? (04/01/97) |
after the madness BY SOL WACHTLER | RANDOM HOUSE, 369 PAGES
BY DAVID FUTRELLE it was quite a fall: Sol Wachtler was New York's chief judge, a respected jurist who was considered by some to be a likely candidate for governor. Then, on a cold day in late 1992, driving home from a bar association meeting in Albany, he found himself pulled to the side of the road by an unmarked FBI van, arrested and led away in shackles. In the end, Wachtler was to spend more than a year behind bars, much of his time spent in solitary confinement. What put the judge in prison was the elaborate and obsessive harassment campaign he'd waged against Joy Silverman, a wealthy socialite with whom he'd had a passionate affair. The affair had ended in 1990, and Wachtler, his moods wildly swinging from the depths of depression to the delusional heights of mania, attempted to win her back in the strangest of ways -- writing her a series of strange and threatening letters under an assumed name, hoping to unsettle her enough to send her rushing back to him, her former lover and protector. Silverman was unsettled, all right, but she turned to the police, not to Wachtler, for help. Those who turn to this book seeking the gory details of Wachtler's sordid affair and its even more sordid aftermath will be disappointed. In an age of lurid confessional memoirs, in which authors trump one another with even more extravagant tales of degradation (You've got incest? I've got bestiality!), Wachtler has written a confessional that manages not to confess much of anything. Wachtler's account of his affair with Silverman, and the ugly campaign of harassment he began after its end, is cursory. Having skipped relatively quickly over his life as a victimizer, Wachtler devotes the bulk of the book to describing his life as a victim. Of his time in prison Wachtler, to be sure, writes with some eloquence, describing in detail the misery of solitary confinement, the casual brutality of prison life and the petty indignities prisoners are made to suffer, from the indifference of prison guards to the humiliations of the strip search. His experience as a prisoner helped him to see, in a way that mere words could not, the baleful effects of mandatory sentencing and the even more maddening results of the collective insanity known as the war on drugs. "After eight months in federal prison I am convinced that there are very few people here who are innocent," he wrote in his prison diary. "I am just as convinced that half the people here do not belong here."
Though Wachtler writes with some authority on the larger matters of crime and punishment, on a personal level this book is far less candid than it should be. Wachtler repeatedly expresses a kind of contrition for what he's done, but he doesn't seem, ultimately, to have taken any real responsibility for his actions. He explains that what he did was inexcusable -- and then he excuses himself: He was sick, he says; his brain was addled by prescription drugs; he didn't know what he was doing. Perhaps he was. But he should be able to see clearly now, and he should see that such answers aren't enough. Wachtler has done his time behind bars, but he still hasn't come to terms with what put him there in the first place.
David Futrelle is the editor of Salon Media Circus. |
