No fault of her own writing, no preciousness or hedging or affectation, could be permitted to distract from the matter at hand. They have the lightness and delicacy The New Yorker required her first pieces for the magazine were Christmastime round-ups of children’s booksbut none of the belletristic mushiness in which some of her colleagues indulged. She worked over her sentences until they became precision instruments, sensitive enough to measure the faintest shifts in atmosphere and pressure. Her prose, she seemed to decide when she emerged as The New Yorker’s design critic in the early 1970s, had to resist “shallow illusion” with vigilance. “The comfortable world of mediocrity” appalls her. Malcolm resolved early in her career not to make the same mistake. “But he does not want to see it, and when a momentary glimpse of it is forced on him, his fear that it will blind and paralyze him is confirmed… He steps back from the edge and remains in the comfortable world of mediocrity grounded in shallow illusion.” For Malcolm, the artist’s refusal to watch this sad couple doing his dishesand to register their humiliation in a picturesuggests his unwillingness to do the very thing he claimed they were keeping him from doing: “become great by engaging with the real.” What “they helplessly display to him is their terror,” Malcolm argues. When they can’t give him the poses he needs, they settle for doing work around the painter’s house, but the pathetic effort of their “intense dumb appeal” so unnerves him that he loses track of his work and sends them on their way. Bellocq, from 1997, takes its central metaphor from a devious Henry James story about a portrait painter who hires a broke, desperate society couple“the real thing,” they insistas models for a set of popular illustrations of the rich. “The real thing” has been an ongoing object of fixation for Malcolm, glittering for more than forty years across her essays, pieces of criticism, and books of reportage. I feel that I have been given not the real thing but something counterfeit. I immediately see that the petals are not rose petals but peony petals. She hastily plucks white petals from a bush in her garden and hands me a basket filled with them. I want to join the procession but have no basket of petals. Little girls in white dresses are walking in a procession, strewing white rose petals from small baskets. I am in the country on a fine day in early summer and there is a village festival. To make dollhouses, she used “orange crates furnished with chairs and tables and beds contrived out of this and that piece of wood or metal or cloth scavenged from around the house.” Her eye for discarded and scavenged objects emerged alongside an acute sense of which ones were false or misleading. In this “ordinary middle-class, middlebrow” household, Malcolm’s taste swung early to stray unassuming things. They settled first in Brooklyn, then in Yorkville, where Malcolm’s father, a psychiatrist and neurologist, set up a medical practice. You used to scrawl me achievement professional#“We were among the small number of Jews who escaped the fate of the rest by sheer dumb luck,” she wrote in a recent essay, “as a few random insects escape a poison spray.” In Prague her parents had “belonged to a community of secular, nationalistic, Czech-speaking Jews,” and now they found themselves in a new country where not only their professional life but also the fabric of their cultural identity“how to represent themselves”had to be reimagined. In the summer of 1939, when she was about to turn five, Janet Malcolm fled Prague with her sister and parents.
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