The New Yorker & Me: Sarah Nicole Prickett's "Magic Mirror": On Janet Malcolm

Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Thursday, August 29, 2019

Sarah Nicole Prickett's "Magic Mirror": On Janet Malcolm

Janet Malcolm (Photo by Kevin Sturman)

I’m having second thoughts about Sarah Nicole Prickett’s “Magic Mirror” (Bookforum, Summer 2019). Yesterday, I deleted my post in which I agreed with her that “malice” is one of Janet Malcolm’s favorite words. As a key to Malcolm’s work, “malice” is overrated. After reading and rereading Prickett’s absorbing essay (as well as the longer version of it on bookforum.com), I realize that the Malcolm I relish – the superb describer, the brilliant analyst – isn’t there. Malcolm’s subtle comparison of Ted Hughes’s two versions of his foreword to the Journals of Sylvia Plath (The Silent Woman); her patient tracing of Freud’s concept of the unconscious through his case histories (“Dora”), her contrasting two versions of Walker Evans’ photo of the tenant farmer’s wife (“Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Pa.”), her ardent defense of Joseph Mitchell’s “fabrications” (“The Master Writer of the City”); her comparison of the various biographical renderings of Chekhov’s death (Reading Chekhov); her close reading of the court documents in the trial of Mazoltuv Borukhova (Iphegenia in Forest Hills) – these and many other memorable analytic moves are what I admire most in Malcolm. She is a comparative analyst extraordinaire. And she writes beautifully – where beauty means clarity, verve, candor, and subtlety. Prickett doesn’t touch on any of this. The closest she comes to getting at the essence of Malcolm’s writing is when she refers to Malcolm’s “typically gloves-off examination” of the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of Anna Karenina (in “Socks”). Yes, Malcolm’s writing is “gloves-off.” But that doesn’t make it malicious; it makes it delicious. I devour it.