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About
A singular investigation into the realm of memory by the legendary New Yorker staff writer, featuring never before published material about her extraordinary life.
For decades, Janet Malcolm's books and dispatches for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books poked and prodded at reportorial and biographical convention, gesturing toward the artifice that underpins both public and private selves. In Pictures, Malcolm turned her gimlet eye on her own life, a task demanding a writer as peerlessly skillful as she was widely known to be. Pictures, then, is not so much the story of a life as an encounter with identity and family photographs in the tradition of Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida.
Pictures begins with the image of a peevish little girl on a train, fleeing Prague with her family in 1939. Her name was Jana Klara Wienerova, her mother tongue was Czech, and she retained no memory of that picture. From there we follow her to the Czech enclave of Yorkville in Manhattan, where her father, a psychiatrist and neurologist, and her mother, an attorney from a bourgeois family, traded their bohemian, Dada-inflected lives for the ambitions of middle-class America. From her early, fitful loves to evenings at the old Metropolitan Opera House to her fascination with what it might mean to be a "bad girl," Malcolm assembles a composite portrait of a New York childhood, one that never escapes the tug of Europe and the mysteries of fate and family. Later, Malcolm writes about her love affair with her editor Gardner Botsford, the world of William Shawn's New Yorker, and the libel trial that led Malcolm to become a character in her own drama, a role she reprised in the writing of this book, where she brought her distinctive critical sensibilities to bear on herself.
Displaying the indelible wit and acute commentary that are Malcolmian trademarks, this brief volume by the woman The Guardian called "America's greatest writer," develops into a self-portrait like few others in our literature.
For decades, Janet Malcolm's books and dispatches for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books poked and prodded at reportorial and biographical convention, gesturing toward the artifice that underpins both public and private selves. In Pictures, Malcolm turned her gimlet eye on her own life, a task demanding a writer as peerlessly skillful as she was widely known to be. Pictures, then, is not so much the story of a life as an encounter with identity and family photographs in the tradition of Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida.
Pictures begins with the image of a peevish little girl on a train, fleeing Prague with her family in 1939. Her name was Jana Klara Wienerova, her mother tongue was Czech, and she retained no memory of that picture. From there we follow her to the Czech enclave of Yorkville in Manhattan, where her father, a psychiatrist and neurologist, and her mother, an attorney from a bourgeois family, traded their bohemian, Dada-inflected lives for the ambitions of middle-class America. From her early, fitful loves to evenings at the old Metropolitan Opera House to her fascination with what it might mean to be a "bad girl," Malcolm assembles a composite portrait of a New York childhood, one that never escapes the tug of Europe and the mysteries of fate and family. Later, Malcolm writes about her love affair with her editor Gardner Botsford, the world of William Shawn's New Yorker, and the libel trial that led Malcolm to become a character in her own drama, a role she reprised in the writing of this book, where she brought her distinctive critical sensibilities to bear on herself.
Displaying the indelible wit and acute commentary that are Malcolmian trademarks, this brief volume by the woman The Guardian called "America's greatest writer," develops into a self-portrait like few others in our literature.
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Reviews
"Superb . . . While [Malcolm's] writing in these passages remains restrained, as it always was, they bear an unwonted intensity of feeling, seemingly held just barely at bay . . . [Still Pictures] unavoidably calls to mind the enduring power of another émigré, the novelist W.G. Sebald, who made similar use of photographs . . . [The] final, splendid, most personal work of her long career."
Charles Finch, The New York Times Book Review
"[Still Pictures] may be the world's most elegant annotated photo album . . . Each sentence, in true Malcolm form, turns out masterful . . . The collage artist puts fragments next to each other to make meaning, or spark energy, and this is what Malcolm does in Still Pictures . . . She is writing about the difficulty we have evoking our former selves, the many ways in which they are strangers to u
Katie Roiphe, The Atlantic
"Possessed of charm and delicacy."
Vivian Gornick, The Nation