SOURCE: “Flaubert and Freud and the Scarsdale Diet Doctor: Mrs. Trilling's Mrs. Harris,” in Commonweal, February 12, 1982, pp. 89-92.

In the following review, Maloff faults what he considers Trilling's psychoanalytic misreading of the Scarsdale murder, finding that her interpretation of the case is closer to pulp fiction than great literature.

For Diana Trilling to evoke the immortal ghosts of Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina in her book of meditations on Jean Harris¹ is not only natural, it is inevitable. Suicide conferred on the fictional characters—what?—stature, significance, dignity, transcendent reality, splendor even, a kind of magnificence which neither possesses in the imagined “life” of the great novels and both acquired only through death. Otherwise, both would have died of ennui and inanition, and we along with them: we are unable to imagine an interesting ongoing life for them.

And so it is with Jean Harris: she came to...