God, I wish I was Janet Malcolm. Fifty or more years as a staff writer on the New Yorker, reviews in the New York Review of Books, the occasional incendiary non-fiction bestseller (In the Freud Archives, The Journalist and the Murderer, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes), even the famous lawsuit. (She was sued for libel by the psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson.) If Janet Malcolm is the thinking woman’s Joan Didion, then Nobody’s Looking at You is her Slouching Towards Bethlehem: a lot less slouching.
Nobody’s Looking at You collects just over a dozen of Malcolm’s articles from the past decade or so, ranging from some pretty stringent profile pieces to a few rambling book reviews and feature articles. The range is impressive, if slightly humourless and bewildering, like flicking through an entire New Yorker without the light relief of the cartoons, the casuals, or Anthony Lane.
The book includes, for example, a thoughtful review of the nine-part cable channel docuseries Sarah Palin’s Alaska, a rather faded colour piece about the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear held in Washington in October 2010 — remember that? no — and two long articles about Tolstoy which show Malcolm off at her formidable, straight-talking best:
A sort of asteroid has hit the safe world of Russian literature in English translation.
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