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 Galchen, 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.

Sunday, July 27, 2025

On One

Patricia Lockwood, in her “Arrayed in Shining Scales,” in the current London Review of Books, writes,

The Silent Woman has everything: psychoanalysts puking because they found Hughes too attractive, Dido Merwin writing an entire essay about how Plath was a foie gras pig, Stevenson palely loitering, thought-foxes, chipped gravestones, poetic tribunals, lesbian readings of ‘The Rabbit Catcher’, and Malcolm being perhaps more on one than any journalist before or since.

What does “on one” mean? Is it a misprint? Maybe not. Google provides this definition: “Acting crazy, stirring the pot, causing trouble, being a menace in any capacity.” Does that describe Malcolm in The Silent Woman? I don’t think so.

If you ask me, Lockwood is the one who's on one. Her "Arrayed in Shining Scales" is as wild and strange as its subject (the life and work of Sylvia Plath). I devoured it. 

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2 comments:

  1. MAJuly 27, 2025 at 4:01 AM

    In Malcolm’s “By the Book” interview in the Times in 2019, she wrote:

    “I like books in the genre that could be described as the bee-in-your-bonnet genre, books in which the author has an obsessive thesis, and argues it so brilliantly that you come away completely convinced and elated by the erudition that has powered the argument.”

    I took Lockwood’s description of Malcolm as “on one” to mean something like this: slightly obsessive, but brilliantly so.

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    1. John MacDougallJuly 27, 2025 at 5:17 AM

      I like that genre, too. “The Silent Woman” is a classic example of it. Was Malcolm “on one” when she wrote it? It depends on the meaning of “on one.” It appears to be a very open-textured term. I’d never heard of it before I read Lockwood’s piece. I’m not sure what it means. Obsessive? Possibly. Brilliant? I don’t think so. Vehemently argumentative? Yes, probably. But that’s not Malcolm. She was argumentative, but in a cool, forensic way – like an analyst. I don’t think “on one” applies to her. But what do I know? I appreciate your comment.

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