Janet Malcolm (1934–2021)

In The Journalist and the Murderer Janet Malcolm examines the relationship between the journalist and his subject, through the example of Joe McGinness and Jeffrey MacDonald, the subject of McGinness's best-selling book, Fatal Vision. McGinness was invited into the inner circle of MacDonald's defense team and he spent hours with MacDonald, and he continued to write friendly letters to MacDonald after MacDonald's conviction for the murder of his wife and daughters. When MacDonald read the show more book, he felt betrayed and sued the author for fraud and breech of contract.

Malcolm was invited to speak with McGinness and to write about the case by McGinness's defense team, but after a single interview, McGinness refused to speak to her again. Malcolm constructed her book out of interviews with various people involved in both cases, as well as the court transcripts, but she notes the absence at the center of the story. Did McGinness cross a line in allowing MacDonald to view him as a sympathetic ear who believed in his innocence? Are journalists free to lie and deceive in order to get their story?

While Malcolm does not provide any solid answers, the presentation of the questions and of the strange story of the relationship between the journalist and the murderer does make for compelling reading and much to think about. show less

Janet Malcolm is a wonderful writer who uses no words lightly and who casts a clear unblinking eye on the painters, photographers, and writers she discusses in these essays, written over several decades and collected here for the first time. For the painters and photographers, the internet was a great resource for me as I was able to look at some of the art Malcolm wrote about.

Of course, some of the pieces spoke to me more than others. The centerpiece of the volume is "A Girl of the show more Zeitgeist," a 75-page essay on Ingrid Sischy and her editorship of Artforum; Malcolm interviewed her and met with her and artists and writers over the course of a year. She writes about Sischy: "She sees moral dilemmas everywhere -- and of course there are moral dilemmas everywhere, only most of us prefer not to see them as such and simply accept the little evasions, equivocations, and compromises that soften the fabric of social life, that grease the machinery of living and working, that make reality less of a constant struggle with ourselves and with others." But the essay is not just "about" Sischy (in fact, many pages go by before the reader "meets" Sischy); it is also about the New York art world (and art criticism world) of the 80s, about differences of opinions, about controversies (one in particular) over public art, about styles of criticism and styles of editing, and about clashing personalities. "I ponder anew the question of authenticity that has been reverberating through the art world of the eighties." It is a tour de force.

But so are many of the other, shorter pieces. In the first, title piece, Malcolm "starts" her portrait of painter David Salle in 41 different ways. In "A House of One's Own," her portrait of Bloomsbury but particularly of Vanessa, she addresses the challenges of writing biography: "Life is infinitely less orderly and more bafflingly ambiguous than any novel . . . we have to face the problem that every biographer faces and none can solve; namely that he is standing on quicksand as he writes. There is no floor under his enterprise, no basis for moral certainty." Among the other authors she writes about are Salinger and Wharton ("The Woman Who Hated Women"); among the photographers, Julia Margaret Cameron, Diane Arbus, and Edward Weston.

I like that she doesn't restrict to her focus to "high art" -- for example, she discusses the "capitalist pastorale" of Gene Stratton-Porter]] whose A Girl of the Limberlost she loved as a girl of 10. But it is her essay about the Gossip Girls series that is truly delightful, starting from its opening line which references Lolita commenting on the moccasin worn the victim when she and Humbert drive past a terrible accident. As she writes about the author of the series:

"The heartlessness of youth is von Ziegesar's double-edged theme, the object of her mockery -- and sympathy. She understands that children are a pleasure-seeking species, and that adolescence is a delicious last gasp (the light is most golden just before the shadows fall) of rightful selfishness and cluelessness. . . Von Ziegesar pulls off the tour de force of wickedly satirizing the young while amusing them. Her designated audience is an adolescent girl, but the reader she seems to have firmly in mind as she writes is a literate, even literary, adult." p. 275.

And "What makes classic children's literature so appealing (to all ages) is its undeviating loyalty to the world of the child. In the best children's books, parents never share the limelight with their children; if they are not killed off on page 1, they are cast in the pitifully minor roles that actual parents play in their children's imaginative lives. That von Ziegesar's parents are as ridiculous as they are insignificant in the eyes of their children only adds to the sly truthfulness of her comic fairy tale." p. 282.

Malcolm almost (that's almost) makes me want to read Gossip Girls, but I would definitely read anything Malcolm herself writes. show less

A dense, learned, and thoroughly illuminating book. At less than two hundred pages, this one is a slow read that deserves your full attention. Malcom begins by disabusing the reader of much of the myths associated with the psychology behind journalism and book writing: it's faux-confessional nature, it's necessary betrayals. This might have been enough, but Malcom's an erudite enough author to take these ideas to all sorts of places, from Freudian psychoanalysis to the differences between show more literature and real life.

This isn't to say that I agree with everything that Malcom puts forth here: she seems, at one point, to argue that real people are both more ambiguous and more tediously predictable than literary characters, a contradiction I can't quite square. And it's likely that readers will probably come to their own conclusions about the murder case discussed in this book before they finish it, a disquieting but wholly predictable parallel to the defendant we meet in its pages. But the author's ability to draw out multiple enormously important intellectual lines of argument when any one of them might have made a good-enough book marks her as an intellect of the first order. The fact that she seems to keep these arguments both cogent and separate throughout the text testifies to her ability as a writer. Janet Malcom was undoubtedly the real thing.

It's also worth noting that she doesn't exempt herself from the theories presented here: as "The Journalist and the Murderer" draws to a close, she expresses her own boredom and emotional exhaustion with the project. This seems like a brave move, and one she did not necessarily have to take. We meet many not-so-honorable people in the pages of this brief work -- including one that may have murdered his family -- and relatively few honest ones, an acerbic, socially committed college professor who also considered writing a book on the events described in the book being among perhaps the best candidates for that distinction. Another, probably, is the author herself, who deserves real credit for taking a hard, honest look at the unavoidable contradictions of her chosen profession. Unsettling in the extreme, but recommended. show less

This is the first time I'm reading Janet Malcolm, and I really appreciated her insights into the tricky question of journalists writing about real-life crimes and the relationships they must create with the crimes' perpetrators. We all know that readers love salacious stories of violent crimes; sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll are great bonuses, too. But what does writing about these topics mean for journalists? How far is too far?

This book strikes an engrossing balance between covering what show more happened between MacDonald and McGinnis and philosophy from Malcolm about the proper roles of all involved. I found it fascinating. Interestingly, I don't come out of the book with a strong position on who was right or wrong, and I think that might be Malcolm's goal. I didn't think MacDonald deserved something better than he got, but I also thought McGinnis crossed a line in his behavior toward MacDonald.

I would read more from Malcolm. I'm thinking next up will be Iphigenia in Forest Hills, which appears to be her own true crime expose. How does she balance these concerns? show less