Disgrace (1999)

I bought a copy of this novel shortly after J.M. Coetzee won his Nobel in 2003, so once again everything takes a long time. It was actually my first by the white South African writer and it’s quite good, complicated, nervy, and tense. Our main guy is a pretentious 52-year-old English professor. At the start he is teaching as an adjunct. He is twice divorced and a creepy self-serving philanderer, which is where the trouble starts when he is dismissed from his job after an affair with a student. This guy’s sexual habits are compulsive and self-destructive and it is obvious he is learning nothing from even his increasing consequences. His pride and rationalizations are so transparently delusional you want to scream. He goes to live with his daughter in the country where she owns and operates a small farm in a small community. She is in her 20s, a lesbian, and something of a “back to the land” hippie, though the story takes place in the present time when the novel was published, not long after the end of apartheid. Then a terrible event takes place, a brutal home invasion, and the rest of the short novel is about attempting to put the shattered pieces back together. In a lot of ways the first half of Disgrace veers close to a thriller, and it’s quite effective. I thought of Elmore Leonard in terms of the compressed, direct language and extreme events reported with sparse, telling details. The second half has some scenes and plot points that felt more strained. I never really cared much for the main guy, David Lurie, even as he changes and a kind of redemption takes place. I’m very tired of bed-hopping main characters, but at least Lurie’s sexual compulsions are not really normalized. They have a definite edge. It’s pretty clear something is wrong with him. Animal deaths are a key part of the story but it’s a nuanced take with multiple levels. The worst is kept offstage and in many ways the novel turns on a heartbreaking euthanasia operation. I shouldn’t complain about the sex here because it’s such a huge part of Lurie’s personality, but his way of moving from partner to partner (woman to woman) is familiar from TV shows and I’m tired of it even when done well. Mostly I was impressed with Coetzee’s lean and powerful language, and also his ability to create scenes of great tension. I’d like to look into more of him, but first impression is that Coetzee warrants the hype and hoopla. He’s good.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)

J.M. Coetzee’s third novel was written while the South Africa apartheid regime was still in place and fearsomely powerful. It shows here in the ways all the recognizable evidence of colonialism is kept so generic. “Barbarians” is the term for native nomads who roam the plains beyond the village where this novel takes place and in the mountains beyond that. They are considered a problem that must be managed. The “Empire” is the distant power in control. The first-person narrator, the “Magistrate,” is a civil servant of the Empire who has spent most of his life in the village. The village is small and settled into routines that are comfortable for the village, the “barbarians,” and the narrator, who is genial and corrupt, mostly in the form of serial affairs. He was evidently always sympathetic to the natives and becomes even more so in this short novel. I stick with the scare quotes for “barbarians” because Coetzee is making the case here that these representations of the Empire show it as no less barbaric. In fact, the Empire’s use of torture is one of the main threads here. The novel has sections devoted to the village life the narrator has become accustomed to. He discusses the brutalities of the Empire, which he grows hostile to as they begin to affect him. After a long and arduous journey to return a young woman (in whom he has developed an interest) to her “barbarian” clan, he is accused of treason (or something) upon his return. He is imprisoned and tortured, and his meditations on the treatment follow. What he describes is horrible, of course, but Coetzee’s clinical dispassionate voice take some of the edge off it. Not that much. He covers the basic points, such as being denied sleep, water, food, bathing, and treatment for his wounds. He is turned into a grotesque and repulsive creature, though his narrative voice remains cool and descriptive. We see the actions of the Empire from his view. They all seem random and irrational. The Empire remains distant and almost benign in its affect. Soldiers appear, life changes in the village. Now the Empire is focused on aggression against the “barbarians”—who prove to be barbaric indeed, though not of course with the obviously vast resources of the Empire. Among other things, Coetzee is very good at showing how the Empire is basically a large and somewhat dysfunctional bureaucracy. Much here is absurd, but the realities of the terrorism of colonialism are vivid and disturbing. As Coetzee intends, this short novel admirably gets under your skin and keeps you uneasy. It has humor but more often horror. It feels authentic to what it is like to live in such regimes.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Reading Chekhov (2001)

I actually forgot this book existed when I started on a project of reading stories by Anton Chekhov recently. I wish I would have remembered sooner because Janet Malcolm discusses another dozen or two stories beyond the ones I cherry-picked from internet recommendations. I know I have to get to his plays as well. Malcolm's slim book is based on travels as well as reading. She visits Russia and Ukraine to see the places Chekhov lived and knew. I don't do much of that sort of traveling myself—or any—but it does provide some interesting side details. As with much of the best of Malcolm, she excels at deep dives reaching for connections with an almost clinical precision. The story she returns to repeatedly is "The Lady With the Dog," but she ranges widely across Chekhov's work and brings an assortment of interesting insights to stories that might not have done much for me at first, such as the long "Ward No. 6" and "Peasants." She talks about Chekhov's literary relationship with Dostoevsky, for whom Chekhov claimed not to care much, and traces out points where Dostoevsky's influence is apparent. I still take much of the similarities I've noticed between them—largely, the blunt voice—as artifact of Constance Garnett, the prolific translator who worked extensively on material by both. I can feel the connection with Dostoevsky most in some of Chekhov's stories I don't like as much. I prefer the ones, like "The Lady With the Dog," that are almost pedestrian, yet elliptical and strangely moving, achieving their effects in ways that send me back with the idea of picking them apart to see how they work. That, in many ways, is Malcolm's project here, and she lingers over and returns frequently to a specific handful, including some of the plays. She loves Chekhov profoundly but resents the way he has become a kind of sentimental icon, a reflexive genius attended by platitudes. She focuses a lot on Chekhov's use of suggestive compressions, implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) arguing it as his greatest strength. I think I agree—there's something deceptively casual about his best work, almost anecdotal, yet so many of these things stick with you for a long while. With his focus on the short story Chekhov can verge on the poetical. But he's also a consummate social realist, and the melancholy of his short life can subtly or not so subtly suffuse the work. Like Thoreau, like Kafka, like H.P. Lovecraft, like Elvis Presley, Chekhov died in his 40s. I'm happy for the beefed-up list.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

In the Freud Archives (1984)

For anyone interested in Janet Malcolm this slim little book is the one that got her into all the trouble, and for that alone it's worth reading. Taking on the intricately insular world of latter-day Freudian scholarship, even as it details the early history of psychoanalysis with typical precision, the book earned the ire of one of Malcolm's subjects here, Jeffrey Masson, a psychoanalyst who appeared from her account to be rather shallow and frivolous, more interested in cultivating his own charisma and cult of adoration. Masson didn't like that so he went after Malcolm with a $10 million lawsuit that kept her virtually tied up in legal minutiae for a decade or more, as one of the issues went all the way to the Supreme Court before the case was remanded back to a jury trial. Masson denied saying some of the things Malcolm attributed to him, such as that he was, after Freud, the greatest analyst who had ever lived and that he had slept with more than 1,000 women. In turn, Malcolm could not produce the statements in question on tape, though later she claimed to have found a notebook with some verification of them. The jury found for Malcolm, saying that Masson's case was simply insufficient, which was something less than a ringing endorsement of Malcolm's journalism. Thus a cloud has been left over them both, and I still see people popping up randomly in comments sections on the Internet to condemn her in absolute terms as a fabricator. It's hard for me to believe, based on the consistency and quality of Malcolm's research during her career, but I don't know any better than anyone else who wasn't there what actually transpired and was said between the two. We will never know. In fairness, Malcolm's objections to that point for tape-recording her subjects—"the practice of depending on a tape recording makes for a lifelessness in the way you report," she has written. "It makes you lazy and inert"—has not helped her case much. On the other hand, she's right, as anyone who has ever attempted to transcribe an interview already knows—people don't speak in perfectly formulated thoughts, and the attempt to clarify the intent of an interview subject's words is one constantly fraught with peril, particularly if your subject has a litigious bent. If I were going to be scrupulously fair about all this I would take the time to read some of Masson's work in order to better judge his credibility relative to Janet Malcolm's. But I'm basically already sold on Malcolm's integrity, and besides, Masson does come off as a bit of an ass, and not just in Malcolm's book. I realize this makes me somewhat less than scrupulously fair.

In case it's not at the library.

The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes (1994)

I read this not so much because I was interested in Sylvia Plath, though I've come to have a good deal of respect and admiration for her work, but more because I was interested in the work of Janet Malcolm generally and specifically for her take on "the biographical enterprise," which is the theme of this book at least as much as it is Plath. And incidentally because at the time this was published I had some ideas of my own about taking on a biography, of a figure who seemed to me to occupy a point equidistant between Plath and Hank Williams—Williams, who may (or may not) have committed suicide proper, but at the very least drank himself purposefully to death, with a harpy at his side shrieking away. Thus many of Malcolm's most trenchant points about suicide and/or the various impossibilities of biography I now find underscored in my copy of the book rather forcefully ("As sleep is necessary to our physiology, so depression seems necessary to our psychic economy," "In a work of nonfiction we almost never know the truth of what happened," etc.). Going through it again recently, I enjoyed Malcolm's wry pleasure at inserting herself into the fraught perils of Sylvia Plath's and Ted Hughes's lives. Hughes died in 1998, nearly five years after the publication of this book. I never followed up enough to know Malcolm's thoughts or actions after such a momentous occasion, or indeed anyone else's involved in the Plath biography industry, with the removal of such a monumental obstacle to the project. For the most part here Malcolm trudges down all the previously trod pathways, not unearthing much new as far as I can tell, but bringing her razor-sharp sensibility to bear, one that is particularly well-suited, I think, to Plath's own at the height of her powers in the last year of her life. Lots of unpleasant people populate this narrative, many of whom clash unpleasantly with one another. I do know the Ann Stevenson biography that animates so much here, Bitter Fame—animates Malcolm herself, who evidently knew of Stevenson when they were both going to college in Michigan. When Malcolm says Stevenson's book is the best biography of the bunch then existing I'm perfectly willing to take her at her word. I remember thinking pretty well of it myself, though I could have had no idea of all the stresses and tensions Stevenson endured to get it done. Malcolm at least seems to have had a milder time of putting hers together, the chief strength of which is in her ability to deal on particularly conscious levels with the sideline "meta" issues that shape and distort the narratives of biographies.

In case it's not at the library.

Fatal Justice: Reinvestigating the MacDonald Murders (1997)

In the mid-'80s, almost immediately in the wake of Joe McGinniss's book Fatal Vision and the celebrated TV movie based on it, Jerry Allen Potter was approached by a retired FBI agent, Ted L. Gunderson, who claimed that the "slam-dunk" case was not all it appeared to be. Potter greeted this assertion with the skepticism that only someone who knows McGinniss's book could have, so damning is the portrait presented there of the so-called Green Beret murderer, Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, who was accused and eventually convicted of brutally slaughtering his wife and two young daughters with bludgeon and knife and then attempting to point the finger for the crime at nameless, faceless Manson-family-like hippies chanting "acid is groovy, kill the pigs." But Gunderson eventually lured Potter into looking harder at the case, and Potter in turn brought in co-author Fred Bost. The book that was published 10 years later based on their findings, Fatal Justice, is a fascinating companion piece to read with the McGinniss, practically inducing whiplash as it so thoroughly takes apart the case against MacDonald, along the way uncovering a good deal of prosecutorial and other misconduct that at the very least dwells in a gray area if it isn't outright malfeasance. The details are grinding and I'm not about to attempt to summarize them here; instead, I urge anyone under the spell of McGinniss's book to consider looking at this. McGinniss's role in the fiasco has been so grotesque that MacDonald was able to successfully sue him for damages in civil court, even as he remained (and remains) housed in federal prison. What concerns me at this moment—arguably off-point, I'll concede, but of more immediate concern—is that now Joe McGinniss has decided he's just the person to write a big book about Sarah Palin, and has moved to Alaska to do so. It's coming out later this year. McGinniss first launched his career as something of a New Journalist prodigy, writing about politics as a young man in 1968 with The Selling of the President, an interesting x-ray of the Nixon campaign for the presidency that year with a decided air of prescience about the way politics was going to be done in the U.S. post-television. But McGinniss hasn't acquitted himself well since—first the MacDonald debacle, and then, in the '90s, a book about the Kennedy family that found him the subject of charges of plagiarism. I'm not nearly as worried about Sarah Palin as I was before she resigned the Alaska governorship and set about proving in earnest for anyone willing to look that she's little more than a grifter preying on ignorant Medicare-leeching Tea Party Bible thumpers. But that doesn't mean I don't have a certain amount of dread about how McGinniss is capable of shooting himself in the foot in an all too likely attempt to crucify her with a calculated "edgy" book he hopes will make him some big bucks. With friends like this, who needs enemies? Fatal Justice, along with Janet Malcolm's The Journalist and the Murderer, make abundantly clear the lazy and arrogant levels on which McGinniss operates. Time for him to just go away now.

In case it's not at the library.

The Journalist and the Murderer (1990)

I was initially drawn to Janet Malcolm's odd and striking meditation on the moralities of journalism by my interest in the Jeffrey MacDonald "acid is groovy" murders case. The focus of Malcolm's book appears at first to be the lawsuit that MacDonald filed against Joe McGinniss, who wrote a bestselling book about the case, Fatal Vision, one that was extremely damning for MacDonald. But I took the thing home and read it that day because of the now famous first line of it, which I read standing there in the bookstore on a Saturday morning browsing visit: "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible." The civil suit on which this slender volume turns was based not on charges of libel—how, after all, does one harm the reputation of a convicted and imprisoned murderer?—but for fraud, and this is the crux of the issue that Malcolm knuckles into with an icy ferocity and an uncanny but perfectly informed sense for the dynamics that exist between journalist and subject. Uncanny, that is, maybe until you realize she has been a staff writer and professional journalist at The New Yorker for decades. Then the only thing uncanny is that she's telling the truth. Of course, the concerns she addresses may seem now, in this day and age of ever-worsening corruptions of journalism, to bear some lamentable air of the quaint. (For myself, I don't count even the New York Times or NPR as ipso facto credible any longer, let alone the Washington Post, let alone television news, let alone Fox—a state of affairs that only makes me sad.) But the passion and energy that Malcolm brings to her analysis does at least serve as some tonic. Here's someone who actually, really cares about the deepest issues of it. Malcolm, of course, has herself been the target of a civil suit for alleged journalistic improprieties (by a cultish psychoanalyst, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, on charges of misrepresenting him in quotation, but more on that down the road) and remains scorned in various quarters as a dishonest fantasist, which adds an intriguing level of complexity and self-interest just under the surface to her arguments here. Ultimately, the two cases are based on entirely different issues, and think what you may of her she is inarguably onto something here that is vital to the enterprise of journalism, as anyone who has practiced it even in passing has had the opportunity to understand. There is an inevitable neediness and vulnerability between subject and journalist, however scrupulously professional both may strive to be, a dynamic between the two of them, however brief their relationship may be, that is as complex and fraught as that between married couples or between therapists and patients. Malcolm's ability to tease out such subtleties, even as her language rises to levels of carefully calibrated thunder (see again her opening sentence), is really nothing short of breathtaking. It's not going too far to call this essential on multiple levels.

In case it's not at the library.

Fatal Vision (1983)

I first encountered this in the '80s, when it was wildly popular after a television production based on it aired and it quickly came to be regarded as something of a true-crime classic, compared favorably to such standards as In Cold Blood and The Executioner's Song. If Amazon customer reviews are any gauge, it's still considered credible and significant, though it's hardly up to the levels of Truman Capote's or Norman Mailer's work. In fact, there are persuasive circumstances casting doubt on the overall integrity of McGinniss now, which we will get to, but even plowing through this again recently I still found it hugely convincing and frequently had to stop and examine more closely, in the context of what's been learned since its publication, exactly what Joe McGinniss appears to be up to in this book. It certainly meets the essential criteria for a solid true-crime book in that the case at its heart is fascinating, heart-wrenching, and lurid. Green Beret medical officer, serial philanderer, and chronic self-aggrandizing exaggerator Jeffrey MacDonald claims that, in the early morning hours of a Monday in February 1970, a group of intruders broke into his home, chanting "Acid is groovy, kill the pigs" as they systematically and brutally slaughtered his pregnant wife and their two daughters, ages 5 and 2, while leaving him with relatively minor injuries. An Army investigation cleared MacDonald of any involvement in the crime, but many years later, in 1979, he was brought to trial and convicted for the murders; he remains in prison still. McGinniss was actually brought in to the case by MacDonald and his defense team in the hope that they could use his account of the crime and trial as ammunition in the public relations battle of the court of public opinion—McGinniss was even formally deputed as a member of the legal team in order to shield anything MacDonald might tell him under client-attorney privilege. At some point during the trial, however, McGinniss decided that MacDonald was actually guilty of the crimes (beyond a reasonable doubt, as he angrily attests still when pressed to it for public statements), although he was fatally slow to let MacDonald know anything of his change of heart, presumably in order to protect his book contract and continue to enjoy the access to MacDonald and his papers that no other journalist could have hoped for at the time (and obviously there were a number of them angling to get in on this story). As I said, the sleight of hand that McGinniss performs in this hefty slab of reportage, nearly 700 pages, is impressive, often using MacDonald's own words against him. Its most notable stunt is probably conjuring almost entirely out of whole cloth a motivation of amphetamine psychosis spurred by MacDonald reading an "Esquire" article about Charles Manson and a Mickey Spillane novel. For those with deeper sources on the evidence or a more nuanced approach—Jerry Allen Potter's and Fred Bost's Fatal Justice provides the former, Janet Malcolm's pithy The Journalist and the Murderer provides the latter—it also becomes apparent just how much McGinniss chose to shade and leave out of his account. With deft and subtle choices, McGinniss created an extremely convincing case for Jeffrey MacDonald as a kind of unprecedented, one-of-a-kind monster—a real thriller-chiller and a dilly of a story for anyone (such as myself) with a fascination for the perversions and depredations of true crime.

In case it's not at the library.