Letter from a Reader 8.10.26

A lot of criticism of true-crime shows faults what the journalist Gwen Ifill called the “missing white woman syndrome,” the tendency of the media to favor stories of white female victims. But a Netflix hit documentary has more complex problems, elizabeth bruenig argues in “The Dishonesty of True Crime,” a smart new Atlantic story.

“Maternal Instinct” focuses on what happened after 27-year-old Taylor Parker visited her pregnant friend Reagan Simmons-Hancock on Oct. 9, 2020. Parker is on death row after events that inspired headlines like: “Texas Woman Allegedly Stabbed Mom-to-Be 100 Times, Then Tried to Steal Baby from Womb” in People.

The Netflix documentary intends to show a criminal and her crimes, Bruenig writes. But it leaves out so much it gives a distorted picture. Parker was neither interviewed nor consulted for “Maternal Instinct,” and her defense lawyers and expert witnesses weren’t, either. And the show makes too little of the findings of an investigator brought on by Parker’s team. The documentary suggests that Parker’s crimes “were carefully calculated out of selfishness and deceit,” Bruening says. In reality, Parker had shown symptoms of profound mental illness for years.

I haven’t seen “Maternal Instinct.” But I’ve watched many episodes of shows like “Dateline,” NBC’s longest running prime-time series. And Bruenig’s overall characterizations of its genre ring true.

“True crime documentaries are entertainment,” she says. “They tend to follow a formula with common elements: villains and victims, mystery and suspense, capture and catharsis. These stories typically adopt the tropes of horror films—eerie music, ominous foreshadowing—and offer the prosecution’s version of events, which favor a tidy and dramatic view of a killer’s means and motives. By omitting vital details from defense teams—in Parker’s case and others—true-crime films portray the grisliest offenses as essentially incomprehensible expressions of wickedness, when reality is invariably more complicated.”

You might wonder how anyone could love Cambridge after last week’s fiasco involving the disgraced professor Jason Arday, who resigned amid a torrent of persuasive accusations of plagiarism and other scholarly misconduct. Penelope Fitzgerald offers an indirect answer in The Gate of Angels, an elegant tweaking of the Faust legend that was a Booker Prize finalist.

In 1912, Cambridge physicists like Ernest Rutherford and C.T.R. Wilson were forging the 20th century’s most fearsome pact with the Devil, the development of atomic power. Other novelists might have used that portentous setting as the backdrop for a tragedy or jeremiad about the perils of technology.

But the Oxford-educated Fitzgerald turns it into something fresher and more than the light social comedy it might at first appear to be. In fewer than 250 pages, The Gate of Angels tells the disarming story of young Fred Fairly, a Junior Fellow in physics at the fictional St. Angelicus College at Cambridge, who first sees his Marguerite, Daisy Saunders, when their bicycles collide.

Fred is besotted, but Daisy vanishes. And the two of them might have no future if he found her. St. Angelicus Fellows may not marry. The college doesn’t allow women—or even female cats—on its grounds, and its blind master worries about what sounds like kittens mewing.

The backgrounds of Fred and Daisy clash, too, it soon turns out. Fred is a middle- if not upper-middle class clergyman’s son. Daisy is a working-class nursing student who loses her job in a misplaced effort to help a patient. And larger forces are at work in the novel as in the Edwardian-era itself: the clash between faith and reason and male privilege and women’s quest for more rights. Biographer Hermione Lee saw the book as Fitzgerald’s most feminist novel, though the author didn’t characterize it as such.