A review of If I Did It, part 2.

This is the second part of a two-part review. Click here to read part 1.

Like a novel written in the first-person voice of an unreliable narrator, If I Did It is not meant—by the publisher, anyway—to be taken at face value. It's the self-portrait of a wife-abuser who somehow worked himself up into thinking he was a victim. To take O.J. Simpson at his word when he writes that "Nicole was on the fast track to hell, and she was determined to take me and the kids with her," is like taking Humbert Humbert at his word when he describes as a romantic idyll his molestation of 12-year-old Dolores Haze. As Simpson relates the tale of how his wife gradually lost control and evolved into a menace, clues drop here and there that it is really Simpson himself who was losing control.

One of the biggest clues drops soon after O.J. and Nicole have separated, very much against O.J.'s wishes. (Later, O.J. writes, the roles were switched, and it was Nicole who wanted to get back together and O.J. who said no.) They are still sleeping together from time to time, but Nicole is also bending O.J.'s ear about the various guys she's dating,

treating me almost like a girlfriend or something—but I didn't mind, I realized that, if nothing else, I was probably her closest friend, a friend she could talk to about anything, and it gave me hope.

One night, O.J. goes clubbing with friends and runs into Nicole and two woman friends, one of whom asks jokingly, "[A]re you stalking your estranged wife?" Mirthful repartee follows, and O.J. rejoins his pals. Later in the evening, though, O.J. finds himself thinking about Nicole "and missing her a little." Why not stop by her house to see if she's awake? As he approaches her door, he sees Nicole on the couch with a male friend.

It was pretty hot and heavy. I took a deep breath and turned to go, but paused to knock on the front door—I rapped on it twice, hard—just to let her know they'd been seen.

A less pathologically narcissistic person might register jealousy or embarrassment at witnessing this awkward scene and feel contrite about his inappropriate response. O.J., however, experiences moral indignation. The following day, he scolds Nicole. "What you do is your business, but the kids were in the house," he says. "I don't think it would be too cool for them to walk in on that shit." Amazingly, Nicole does not (in O.J.'s account, at least) tell O.J. off for peeping in her window late at night. Instead, she apologizes, says she'd been drinking, and promises it won't happen again.

Flash forward to the night of Nicole's killing. O.J. is alone *. He's returned from his daughter's dance recital and is feeling, once again, unmanned.

I was getting old. I could hardly walk anymore, and I'd been told recently that I would eventually have to have both knees rebuilt. Plus the arthritis was killing me.

[…]

I was trying to figure out how it had come to this. I'd been somebody once. I'd had my glory days on the playing field, a number of high-paying corporate gigs, many years as a football analyst, and even something of a career as a Hollywood actor. It wasn't over, not by a long shot, but everything seemed more difficult now. …[I]t seemed like every day it took a little more energy, and Nicole was sapping up a lot of my goddamn energy.

O.J.'s thoughts drift to his father, with whom he didn't speak for 10 years, and he thinks maybe he wasn't such a bad guy after all: "I had always blamed him for my parents' marriage not working out … [but] he had always been there for us kids." Then O.J. thinks about the night he stumbled onto Nicole "going at it on the couch, in the glow of two dozen candles—while the kids were in the house" [italics his]. As O.J. ponders Nicole's declining parenting skills, the inquisitive reader may choose instead to marvel that O.J. watched Nicole "going at it" long enough to count how many candles she had lit. "We don't know the half of it," O.J. thinks [italics his], recalling a comment from a friend at the recital about Nicole's drinking and drug-taking.