on Janet Malcolm

As sometimes happens to the bushy ethnic female gone Manhattan metropole, in her way with prose Janet Malcolm was Presbyterian-lucid, like a softer (more big-hearted?) Gena Rowlands in Another Woman (1988). She was honest as steel and often similarly woolen—whereas I myself would rather watch Sandy Dennis flinch before making an incision, or Vivian Gornick’s wheels veer poetically off-rail with effortless, oil slick digressions, perfect punchlines to her adventures in rhetoric. 

Malcolm, on the other hand, was more constrained, as in, controlled. Whatever knowingness she shared with Joan Didion’s pipsqueak sangfroid quality was adulterated by a kind of librarian martyrdom. She wasn’t always starchy but once she landed on base camp Eileen Fisher, or began pairing 70s wire rim glasses with tweed blazers, it would take a certain shade of priest to envision her in the throes of desire. That her pet subjects were psychoanalysis, journalism, biography, photography, and people’s morals meant that Malcolm cared almost exclusively about what, in the twentieth century, were taken to be fertile practices, and she died in the early 2020s, just as that era was ending for real, its final bounty being harvested. 

As James Wood once put it, referring to her epic Plath-Hughes opus, Malcolm was the cat who licked clean the plate of a cultural milieu she barely outlived to inherit: an age that, by default, directed an amount of material and critical sway towards print magazines and midsize publishing houses that today seems not only baroque but chimerical. A childhood refugee from Nazism, Malcolm was inured, if not un-alert, to the cruelties of changing cultural winds, particularly in urban settings. Those things she did want to remember in their passing she would give clean definition, only to quietly create loopholes for more open understandings. There was always, in her work, a backdoor through which the dependably gimlet, cool-toned narrator might flee the heat of her own shadow, the too-muchness of staking one’s intellectual preoccupations.

Anyhow, I’ll leave Malcolm to the Boys. They need her most, having become far too Sabbatean.