Review by New York Times Review
IT WILL SEEM perverse, but it can't be helped: To understand how Janet Malcolm has become one of the most distinctive American writers, you must ignore the 2,823 pages of her dozen books - even the one that occasions this review, "Nobody's Looking at You" - and focus on her single book of photographs. Published in 2008, "Burdock" is so apparently peripheral to her corpus that Malcolm's Wikipedia page doesn't include it in an otherwise exhaustive bibliography. The book's 28 color plates are images Malcolm took of the large green leaves of the burdock. Why this plant? "Burdock is a rank weed," she writes, "that grows along roadsides and in waste places and around derelict buildings. It has a rough, harsh atmosphere. Writers have used it to denote ruin and desolation; Chekhov, for example, has burdock growing outside the unspeakable hospital of his story 'Ward No. 6,' and Hawthorne marks the decline of his house of seven gables with 'an enormous fertility of burdocks' nestled in its angles.... It is a tall, unruly ensemble of oversized lower leaves and thrusting stems of smaller leaves, culminating in spires of thistle-like magenta flowers that turn into burrs. In nature the lower leaves - the leaves that I collect - have a messy droopingness; they seem to be crawling along the ground. In my attic studio, stuck in bottles filled with reviving water, they come to attention and into their own. No associations of gloom and roughness adhere to them. Even before the camera completes the task, my act of plunder has given them aesthetic clout. Each leaf assumes its own pose and exhibits, almost flaunts, its individuality." The passage I quote showcases a number of characteristic Malcolm gestures. There is above all the precision of usage: "rank" (which means growing too thickly and having a foul smell, but first meant proud and then luxuriant and then, in its abundance, a pest, a history of meaning hidden in Malcolm's monosyllable); "atmosphere" (this seems precisely the wrong word to describe a weed, but in Malcolm's use it suggests that the plant's abundance has a weather of its own); "ensemble" (a group of musicians, making the weed not a random mess but a harmonious whole); "spires" (invoking the contradictory architecture of this dissolute thing); or ... I'll stop there (though one pines to argue for "unspeakable," "unruly" and, of course, "plunder"). All that verbal care delivers news from Malcolm's well-stocked mind. Chekhov and Hawthorne used the weed as a symbol in their fiction, Malcolm's knowledge showcasing not her smarts but the contrast the paragraph is built to deliver: the gloom that has, in another wonderful Malcolm word, adhered to the plant - its reduction to symbolism in literature; its misrepresentation as uninterestingly ugly - which is, to Malcolm, an error, a wrong. She wants to show us, through her photographs, a way we might see things differently. SEEING THINGS DIFFERENTLY IS the essence of what sets Malcolm apart. Few writers pay attention with the precision, acuity and patience she has exhibited during her career of telling stories about other rank weeds: the faces people show the world. Her work was hybrid before hybrid was a thing: It balances her skills as a reporter (avid, nosy attention) with those of a scholar (writing about anything, it's clear she's read everything), a literary critic (tuned to how language, written or spoken, foregrounds its maker's gifts and faults) and, above all, a storyteller. She is uncommonly concerned with finding a form that delivers the force of the story she is telling. Malcolm has been a magazine journalist for half a century - writing for The New Yorker for 55 years - and to say that she has been formally innovative is, broadly speaking, against journalistic type. Journalists depend on pre-existing forms to ensure they get deadline work done, the storytelling wheel not reinvented just turned around again and again. The "profile," for example, what Malcolm has called "the lax genre of personality journalism," has a familiar rotation: A first section situates us in the subject's compelling company; a second summarizes the work that sets the subject apart; a third charts their biographical path; a fourth puts us with them excitingly again. I know this structure in my bones: I make a living executing it. To read Malcolm remaking the profile is both a lesson for readers (I am learning so much!) and a tacit reproach to fellow practitioners (I am wasting my life!). Consider "Forty-One False Starts," Malcolm's 1994 profile of the painter David Salle. Each of Malcolm's 41 numbered sections starts as if the piece had begun again: "All during my encounter with the artist David Salle.... "In the winter of 1992,1 began a series of interviews with the artist David Salle"; "When I was interviewing the artist David Salle...." Some of these false starts accumulate into mini-essays on microtopics relating to Salle (the fickleness of the art world; Salle's sense of being misunderstood; Thomas Bernhard's fiction), while others peter out (Malcolm's biographical section on Salle is one exhausted sentence). What does this amount to? The Salle who emerges is both vain and un-self-conscious, talented and slipshod, fascinating and pedestrian. A journalist might see in this inconsistency a series of failed ledes; an art aficionado might see an attempt at mimesis, with Malcolm embodying in the form of her piece the fractured sensibility of Salle's own paintings, their disarray. But the reader experiences them as a performance of the limits inherent in knowing anyone: Most people don't add up. While the aim of many profiles is to assemble a clear, and not infrequently flattering, view of a person, Malcolm is willing to acknowledge imperfection - her subject's; her own - and to deliver doubt. "Nobody's Looking at You" features essays written between 1996 and 2018. These 18 pieces are organized into three unnamed parts, but they conspire to form a meaningful whole. The first consists of five profiles; the second collects reportage that looks at the way we speak, variously defined, and how it reveals (often unpleasantly) our natures; the third, and longest, showcases Malcolm's literary criticism. The book's cunning title suggests its uniting theme: how rarely, when we look at or listen to or read someone's work, we manage to see things clearly. Malcolm's title is salvaged from what is an otherwise frustrating profile of the clothing designer Eileen Fisher. Fisher proved an opaque subject for Malcolm. They spoke many times, and Malcolm was granted access to meetings in which she found herself marooned on the little island of Fisher's executives, with its strange corporate patois. Malcolm was also baffled by some of what Fisher said, at one point remarking, "I had no idea what she was talking about." Fisher insisted that the piece was about "Eileen Fisher," the corporate entity, while Malcolm insisted that it was about Eileen Fisher, the real person. "When you say 'It's not about me' and that you're not interesting," Malcolm observed, "that's a very modest way of talking about yourself." "I grew up Catholic," Fisher replied. "You know, the 'Nobody's looking at you' thing.... That's what my mother said all the time. 'Nobody's looking at you.' ... It was just safer to be invisible." While it's fair to say that Malcolm's desire to write about Fisher was effectively thwarted by her subject-we get an unrevealing tale of Fisher putting a cat out and a look at the way corporate minders try to keep executives blandly on point when doing publicity - Malcolm did come away with that phrase, which could be her battle cry. At the start of her landmark book, "The Journalist and the Murderer" - her consideration of the relationship between subjects and authors occasioned by Joe McGinness's nonfiction book about Jeffrey MacDonald, a doctor who killed his pregnant wife and two little daughters - Malcolm wrote: "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse." Malcolm implicates herself in that immorality, and the essays in "Nobody's Looking at You" might be understood, in their sequencing, as an amplification of that earlier book's famous opening and frank project. For after the fraught Fisher piece sets the bar low on visibility, Malcolm gives us a feast of looking in the next profile, "Performance Artist," about the young piano virtuosa Yuja Wang. As famous for her fiery playing as for her risque outfits, Wang saw her onstage clothing described by one music critic, Malcolm tells us, as "stripper-wear." Here is how Malcolm puts Wang before us for the first time: "Her back was bare, thin straps crossing it. She looked like a dominatrix or a lion tamer's assistant. She had come to tame the beast of a piece, this half-naked woman in sadistic high heels." If the piece on Fisher, a clothing designer, was about how we mask ourselves in what we wear, the Wang piece is about how an artist discloses herself through her performances, figuratively and literally. Watching and listening to Wang, Malcolm wonders, "Is the seeing part a distraction (Glenn Gould thought it was) or is it - can it be - a heightening of the musical experience?" Seeing, listening: They're the two major faculties upon which the journalist depends. Frequently Malcolm admits to her limitations. After Wang tells her about discovering Mozart, Malcolm confesses that she "didn't and still don't completely understand." In a profile of the broadcaster Rachel Maddow, Maddow's explanation of how she decides what the focus of a given show will be and how her meeting with her staff during the day tends to confuse more than clarify her intentions, Malcolm tells us: "I noticed none of this at the meeting I attended; I just found it hard to follow." These admissions don't feel like rhetorical moves, ethical appeals meant to earn the reader's good will. Rather they feel like the substance of lived life, revealingly shared. Malcolm's presence in these pieces, you might at this point feel like reminding me, could be understood as nothing more than the habit of mind pioneered by the socalled New Journalists: Gay Tálese, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson. And yet I am here to disagree. Taking no particular issue with the work of her colleagues, I wish nonetheless to say that Malcolm, line to line, is a more revealing writer, one whose presence in her pieces isn't meant to advertise the self so much as complicate the subject. And also, line to line, she is a better writer. Here, in the new book, is how Malcolm sees Dianne Feinstein: "A'30s movie character in her own right, with her Mary Astor loveliness, and air of just having arrived with a lot of suitcases." Here is how she describes a moment in the history of the Supreme Court: "The hearing for the nomination of Ruth Bader Ginsburg had the atmosphere of a garden party held to fete a beloved aunt about to embark on a wonderful journey." Of "Sarah Palin's Alaska," a reality show of yore: "Something always seems a little off in reality television. You don't believe that what you are seeing happened in the way it is shown to have happened, any more than you think that the man in the Magritte was born with an apple attached to his face." Each of these evocations is as much a portrait of the thing being said as of the person saying it, a person who, in addition to all her other virtues, is frequently very funny. Then there is Malcolm's reading of the face of John Roberts, in her timely essay "The Art of Testifying," as he faced congressional questioning before his confirmation as chief justice of the Supreme Court: "Roberts had a wonderful way of listening to questions. His face was exquisitely responsive. The constant play of expression on his features put one in mind of 19th-century primers of acting in which emotions - pleasure, agreement, dismay, uncertainty, hope, fear - are illustrated on the face of a model. When it was his turn to speak, he did so with equal mesmerizing expressiveness. Whenever he said 'With all due respect, Senator' - the stock phrase signaling disagreement - he looked so genuinely respectful, almost regretful, that one could easily conclude that he was agreeing with his interlocutor rather than demurring." Such a description is - to use one of Malcolm's characteristic superlatives - delicious. It is the micro version of the form of her essay on David Salle: an accumulation, through the presentation of differences, of a singular picture of ambiguity. The key, if there is a key, to finding the source of Malcolm's dedication to this complexity arrives at the end of "Nobody's Looking at You," in its largest section, devoted to Malcolm's superb literary criticism. In an essay on the magisterial control Tolstoy exerts over the world he invents, Malcolm writes: "As we read 'Anna Karenina,' we are under the same illusion of authorlessness we are under as we follow the stories that come to us at night and seem to derive from some ancient hidden reality rather than from our own, so to speak, pens." What Malcolm seems to pine for - what all writers do and few manage to seize - is authority, the kind of understanding that only the creator, or a rare creator anyway, can claim for the stories we live. "If the world could write by itself," Isaac Babel observed, "it would write like Tolstoy." But because the world can't, we are fortunate to have Malcolm's kind of authority, one founded as much on her failures as on her successes at seeing. WYATT mason is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 9, 2019]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Malcolm (Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers) assembles an eclectic group of essays, mainly culled from the New Yorker and New York Review of Books, most of them from the past decade, into this outstanding collection. Varied and witty, the book includes profiles of such people as fashion designer Eileen Fisher, with her "aesthetic of elegant plainness" and concert pianist Yuja Wang, "whose tiny dresses and spiky heels" draw attention to the contrast between her petite frame and the "forcefulness she achieves at her instrument." Several essays are literary critiques, touching on, among other points, New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell's ability to "bend actuality to [his] artistic will" and how Tolstoy follows the "deep structures" of dream logic in Anna Karenina. Malcolm also explores the differing ways millennials and baby boomers view sexual harassment, email etiquette, and the high-stakes drama of John Roberts's Supreme Court nomination hearings, where little was learned about his judicial philosophy, but revelations about character emerged. With no weak selections and several strikingly prescient ones, this collection shows its author as a master of narrative nonfiction. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Originally published in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books from the 1990s to 2018, these essays from critic Malcom (Forty-One False Starts) cover a gamut of topics and individuals, including fashion designer Eileen Fisher, pianist Yuja Wang, New York's Argosy Book Store, TV host Rachel Maddow, Sarah Palin's reality show, a hilarious piece on the perils of email, and analyses of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. The catchy title is attributed to Fisher's mother who said these words constantly to her daughter who would become hugely successful. An entry related to the confirmation of Supreme Court nominees David Souter, John Roberts, and Samuel Alito is particularly poignant when compared to contemporary proceedings. And in an excellent essay addressing the current state of Russian fiction translated into English, Malcolm parses older and newer attempts, criticizing efforts to "put Tolstoy into awkward contemporary-sounding English." This collection also contains reprints of notable book reviews, including those of Quentin Bell's Bloomsbury Recalled and a controversial biography of poet Ted Hughes. VERDICT Highly recommended for a range of readers, especially those interested in the various topics discussed. [See Prepub Alert, 8/27/18.]-Erica Swenson -Danowitz, Delaware Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Media, PA © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A master of the craft offers up sprightly and fervent essays.Malcolm's latest collection is a follow-up to Forty-One False Starts (2013), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. These 18 pieces, most previously published in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books over the past 10 years, explore a pleasingly wide range of subjects. The first section consists of profiles. In the admiring titular piece, the author examines fashion designer Eileen Fisher, whose clothes "look as if they were heedlessly flung on rather than anxiously selected." Malcolm herself became part of Fisher's "kind of cult of the interestingly plain." A photo of the pianist Yuja Wang, an "existential prodigy," graces the cover of the book and is the subject of "Performance Artist." Malcolm seems as much impressed with the "characteristically outr," extremely short and tight dresses Wang wears when performing, accompanied by a pair of "sadistic high heels," as she is with Wang's musical brilliance. Things quiet down in "Three Sisters," about New York City's Argosy Bookshop and the accomplished women who run it. Then there's the "current sweetheart of liberal cable TV," MSNBC's Rachel Maddow; the author calls Maddow's show "TV entertainment at its finest." The second section has cultural takes, most with a political edge. Malcolm is struck by the "atmosphere of a cold war propaganda film" in the cable TV docuseries Sarah Palin's Alaska. The author's incisive article sorting out the recent Supreme Court confirmation hearings' hijinks is especially timely and scathing, while "Pandora's Click" examines "email's evil," more "like a dangerous power tool" than "harmless kitchen appliance." The last section covers literature and book reviews: Tolstoy, Constance Garnett's translations (which Malcolm loves), the Bloomsbury Group, Ted Hughes, and a resuscitating assessment of Norman Podhoretz's memoir Making It. Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novels are a "literary confection ofgossamer deliciousness."Intelligent, savvy, and stylish literary journalism. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
