Janet Malcolm (1934–2021)

"Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows what he does is morally indefensible."
This is a thought-provoking look at a murder case that has held the nation's attention for over 50 years. It also examines the process that journalists employ to get a story, and the resulting effects it ultimately has on the written product. It is something that readers should keep in mind as they read nonfiction books. I for one, read true crime and have noticed that most authors of this genre are not completely objective. Interesting ideas and still relevant.… (more)

A dense, learned, and thoroughly illuminating book. At less than two hundred pages, this one is a slow read that deserves your full attention. Malcom begins by disabusing the reader of much of the myths associated with the psychology behind journalism and book writing: it's faux-confessional nature, it's necessary betrayals. This might have been enough, but Malcom's an erudite enough author to take these ideas to all sorts of places, from Freudian psychoanalysis to the differences between literature and real life.

This isn't to say that I agree with everything that Malcom puts forth here: she seems, at one point, to argue that real people are both more ambiguous and more tediously predictable than literary characters, a contradiction I can't quite square. And it's likely that readers will probably come to their own conclusions about the murder case discussed in this book before they finish it, a disquieting but wholly predictable parallel to the defendant we meet in its pages. But the author's ability to draw out multiple enormously important intellectual lines of argument when any one of them might have made a good-enough book marks her as an intellect of the first order. The fact that she seems to keep these arguments both cogent and separate throughout the text testifies to her ability as a writer. Janet Malcom was undoubtedly the real thing.

It's also worth noting that she doesn't exempt herself from the theories presented here: as "The Journalist and the Murderer" draws to a close, she expresses her own boredom and emotional exhaustion with the project. This seems like a brave move, and one she did not necessarily have to take. We meet many not-so-honorable people in the pages of this brief work -- including one that may have murdered his family -- and relatively few honest ones, an acerbic, socially committed college professor who also considered writing a book on the events described in the book being among perhaps the best candidates for that distinction. Another, probably, is the author herself, who deserves real credit for taking a hard, honest look at the unavoidable contradictions of her chosen profession. Unsettling in the extreme, but recommended.… (more)