Janet Malcolm. (Courtesy The New Yorker)

In 2011, Janet Malcolm underwent the literary rite of a Paris Review interview. As part of its tradition, the magazine permits interview subjects to reread and revise their words: they have an impressive degree of control over their self-presentation, which presumably makes the whole exercise more appealing. Often the effect is of a long chat on a porch in the Berkshires between an elder statesman and a respectful apprentice, who nods sagely at the importance of rising early to write.

But most interview subjects have not spent their careers contemplating the treachery of the interview. Most interview subjects have not made their names dissecting flattering self-presentation. Most interview subjects are not Janet Malcolm.

A regular contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, Ms. Malcolm has written 11 books of nonfiction over the last three decades. Her latest, the collection Forty-One False Starts (FSG, 320 pp., $27), came out this month. While her subjects vary (from William Shawn to Gossip Girl), her preoccupations and techniques remain consistent. She’s interested in the way stories, especially ones presented as fact, are told. She has a dauntless appetite for the historical roughage—transcripts, letters, diaries, articles—that constitutes those stories’ raw material. And her portraits of the storytellers, with their squirmy foibles and agendas, are glorious.

The Paris Review interview is not among the new book’s selections from Ms. Malcolm’s recent work, which is perfectly reasonable but is still too bad. Her encounter with her interviewer, Katie Roiphe, makes a great Janet Malcolm piece—it’s riveting, excruciating reading. Ms. Malcolm communicates strictly over email. The exquisite tension of her exchange with Ms. Roiphe derives not from any hostility but from the reader’s constant awareness of the situation’s delicate, artificial nature. By substituting correspondence for conversation, Ms. Malcolm has kept herself firmly in the accustomed role of writer, as Ms. Roiphe acknowledges, and in the course of the interview Ms. Roiphe becomes, like many of the best Malcolm characters, a figure unshakably dedicated to an impossible, esoteric project. She does not provoke scorn, just vicarious anxiety. And Ms. Malcolm, even as she terrifies anyone who might ever hope to interview her, does not seem like a tyrant. Every Paris Review interviewee has the power she wields—it’s just that Ms. Malcolm declines to make any coy pretense otherwise. She prevents us from ignoring what’s going on.

In Forty-One False Starts, Ms. Malcolm directs our attention to an assortment of people mired in similarly fraught struggles over narrative control. There’s the painter David Salle (in the title essay), a fading art star who can’t resist getting in tight spots with the press, even when his critics are out for blood. There’s Quentin Bell, Bloomsbury’s historian as well as its heir, doing damage control after his sister’s bitter memoir. There are the old guard and new guard at Artforum in the ’80s, who all have a stake in how editor Ingrid Sischy runs her magazine. Ms. Malcolm depicts their vanities and conflicts with sympathy, diligence and wit.

The disciplines that she’s engaged at greater length elsewhere—psychoanalysis, legal procedure, biography, journalism—inform these essays on art (especially photography) and literature. In a profile of photographer Thomas Struth, Ms. Malcolm’s subject discusses the education he received from Bernd and Hilla Becher. They helped him understand his medium’s connection with other disciplines, Mr. Struth says; for example, “a typical thing Bernd would say was, ‘You have to understand the Paris photographs of Atget as the visualization of Marcel Proust.’” Ms. Malcolm asks what this means. Mr. Struth admits that he’s never actually read Proust, so he’s not quite sure. They agree it was probably a bad example. They both laugh. Later, she writes,

As we were leaving the café, Struth said, ‘I feel bad about Proust and Atget.’ Struth is a sophisticated and practiced subject of interviews. He had recognized the Proust-Atget moment as the journalistic equivalent of one of those ‘decisive moments’ when what the photographer sees in the viewfinder jumps out and says ‘This is going to be a photograph.’ I made some reassuring noises, but I knew and he knew that my picture was already on the way to the darkroom of journalistic opportunism.

Both emerge unscathed from this encounter, in my reading: it seems right, actually, to show them tacitly acknowledging the nature of their transaction, especially given its bearing on their respective professions. As Ian Frazier writes in his introduction, the moment provides a “final optical adjustment” on the piece.

But this is the kind of moment that drives Ms. Malcolm’s critics nuts. Her most infamous piece of writing remains the line that opens 1990’s The Journalist and the Murderer: “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.” This was the line that got her denounced as a traitor. (Twenty years later, a tellingly defensive Tom Junod was still fuming over her “utterly full of shit ... self-hatred.”) Yet it seems bizarre to take this at face value, as an announcement that her entire career is in bad faith. For one thing, nobody could read the remembrance of Joseph Mitchell included in Forty-One False Starts and not sense some journalistic fellow feeling. And even in tone (“too stupid or too full of himself”), it seems apparent that her gambit was more a provocative critique than a factual summary. Its primary function was to affirm her self-awareness—and self-awareness is central to all her work, because she gets away with her unforgiving reports on others by taking an equally unsparing view of herself.

I sympathize, though, with those who might find all that journalistic self-awareness a little tiresome after a while. In Iphigenia in Forest Hills, Ms. Malcolm’s last book, she was still writing of journalism’s malice (“its animating impulse,” as she calls it), while at the same time—much more interestingly—tracking her own crazy sympathy for the defendant in a murder trial, a woman who seems almost certainly guilty and at the same time deeply wronged. The malice-of-journalism passages read like warm-ups (or, less charitably, tics), as if Ms. Malcolm were revisiting some familiar exercises before moving on to the book’s real challenge: her conflicted emotional investment in the case.

This new collection finds her less insistent on truisms regarding narrators and their unreliability. The reader doesn’t get the impression that Ms. Malcolm has softened with time, just that she’s thoroughly established her terms and now feels free to work within them. There’s always been wit to her descriptions of weird insular worlds (psychoanalysis, contemporary art), but some of the pieces here have a looser kind of affectionate humor. Without any diminishment of her critical eye, she seems like she’s having more fun—when she describes Gene Stratton-Porter writing deranged children’s books, or Julia Margaret Cameron admiring England’s finest beards, or Blair Waldorf sulking over caviar at the Plaza.

“I would like to go on telling Blair stories until they are gone,” she writes of the Gossip Girl anti-heroine. I confess I feel much the same way about Ms. Malcolm herself.

editorial@observer.com

]]>

Janet Malcolm. (Courtesy The New Yorker)

In 2011, Janet Malcolm underwent the literary rite of a Paris Review interview. As part of its tradition, the magazine permits interview subjects to reread and revise their words: they have an impressive degree of control over their self-presentation, which presumably makes the whole exercise more appealing. Often the effect is of a long chat on a porch in the Berkshires between an elder statesman and a respectful apprentice, who nods sagely at the importance of rising early to write.

But most interview subjects have not spent their careers contemplating the treachery of the interview. Most interview subjects have not made their names dissecting flattering self-presentation. Most interview subjects are not Janet Malcolm.

A regular contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, Ms. Malcolm has written 11 books of nonfiction over the last three decades. Her latest, the collection Forty-One False Starts (FSG, 320 pp., $27), came out this month. While her subjects vary (from William Shawn to Gossip Girl), her preoccupations and techniques remain consistent. She’s interested in the way stories, especially ones presented as fact, are told. She has a dauntless appetite for the historical roughage—transcripts, letters, diaries, articles—that constitutes those stories’ raw material. And her portraits of the storytellers, with their squirmy foibles and agendas, are glorious.

The Paris Review interview is not among the new book’s selections from Ms. Malcolm’s recent work, which is perfectly reasonable but is still too bad. Her encounter with her interviewer, Katie Roiphe, makes a great Janet Malcolm piece—it’s riveting, excruciating reading. Ms. Malcolm communicates strictly over email. The exquisite tension of her exchange with Ms. Roiphe derives not from any hostility but from the reader’s constant awareness of the situation’s delicate, artificial nature. By substituting correspondence for conversation, Ms. Malcolm has kept herself firmly in the accustomed role of writer, as Ms. Roiphe acknowledges, and in the course of the interview Ms. Roiphe becomes, like many of the best Malcolm characters, a figure unshakably dedicated to an impossible, esoteric project. She does not provoke scorn, just vicarious anxiety. And Ms. Malcolm, even as she terrifies anyone who might ever hope to interview her, does not seem like a tyrant. Every Paris Review interviewee has the power she wields—it’s just that Ms. Malcolm declines to make any coy pretense otherwise. She prevents us from ignoring what’s going on.

In Forty-One False Starts, Ms. Malcolm directs our attention to an assortment of people mired in similarly fraught struggles over narrative control. There’s the painter David Salle (in the title essay), a fading art star who can’t resist getting in tight spots with the press, even when his critics are out for blood. There’s Quentin Bell, Bloomsbury’s historian as well as its heir, doing damage control after his sister’s bitter memoir. There are the old guard and new guard at Artforum in the ’80s, who all have a stake in how editor Ingrid Sischy runs her magazine. Ms. Malcolm depicts their vanities and conflicts with sympathy, diligence and wit.

The disciplines that she’s engaged at greater length elsewhere—psychoanalysis, legal procedure, biography, journalism—inform these essays on art (especially photography) and literature. In a profile of photographer Thomas Struth, Ms. Malcolm’s subject discusses the education he received from Bernd and Hilla Becher. They helped him understand his medium’s connection with other disciplines, Mr. Struth says; for example, “a typical thing Bernd would say was, ‘You have to understand the Paris photographs of Atget as the visualization of Marcel Proust.’” Ms. Malcolm asks what this means. Mr. Struth admits that he’s never actually read Proust, so he’s not quite sure. They agree it was probably a bad example. They both laugh. Later, she writes,

As we were leaving the café, Struth said, ‘I feel bad about Proust and Atget.’ Struth is a sophisticated and practiced subject of interviews. He had recognized the Proust-Atget moment as the journalistic equivalent of one of those ‘decisive moments’ when what the photographer sees in the viewfinder jumps out and says ‘This is going to be a photograph.’ I made some reassuring noises, but I knew and he knew that my picture was already on the way to the darkroom of journalistic opportunism.

Both emerge unscathed from this encounter, in my reading: it seems right, actually, to show them tacitly acknowledging the nature of their transaction, especially given its bearing on their respective professions. As Ian Frazier writes in his introduction, the moment provides a “final optical adjustment” on the piece.

But this is the kind of moment that drives Ms. Malcolm’s critics nuts. Her most infamous piece of writing remains the line that opens 1990’s The Journalist and the Murderer: “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.” This was the line that got her denounced as a traitor. (Twenty years later, a tellingly defensive Tom Junod was still fuming over her “utterly full of shit ... self-hatred.”) Yet it seems bizarre to take this at face value, as an announcement that her entire career is in bad faith. For one thing, nobody could read the remembrance of Joseph Mitchell included in Forty-One False Starts and not sense some journalistic fellow feeling. And even in tone (“too stupid or too full of himself”), it seems apparent that her gambit was more a provocative critique than a factual summary. Its primary function was to affirm her self-awareness—and self-awareness is central to all her work, because she gets away with her unforgiving reports on others by taking an equally unsparing view of herself.

I sympathize, though, with those who might find all that journalistic self-awareness a little tiresome after a while. In Iphigenia in Forest Hills, Ms. Malcolm’s last book, she was still writing of journalism’s malice (“its animating impulse,” as she calls it), while at the same time—much more interestingly—tracking her own crazy sympathy for the defendant in a murder trial, a woman who seems almost certainly guilty and at the same time deeply wronged. The malice-of-journalism passages read like warm-ups (or, less charitably, tics), as if Ms. Malcolm were revisiting some familiar exercises before moving on to the book’s real challenge: her conflicted emotional investment in the case.

This new collection finds her less insistent on truisms regarding narrators and their unreliability. The reader doesn’t get the impression that Ms. Malcolm has softened with time, just that she’s thoroughly established her terms and now feels free to work within them. There’s always been wit to her descriptions of weird insular worlds (psychoanalysis, contemporary art), but some of the pieces here have a looser kind of affectionate humor. Without any diminishment of her critical eye, she seems like she’s having more fun—when she describes Gene Stratton-Porter writing deranged children’s books, or Julia Margaret Cameron admiring England’s finest beards, or Blair Waldorf sulking over caviar at the Plaza.

“I would like to go on telling Blair stories until they are gone,” she writes of the Gossip Girl anti-heroine. I confess I feel much the same way about Ms. Malcolm herself.

editorial@observer.com

]]> http://observer.com/2013/05/not-too-stupid-reflections-on-50-years-of-janet-malcolms-fatal-vision/feed/ 0 mfischer Janet Malcolm. (Courtesy The New Yorker) http://observer.com/2013/05/mind-vacations/#comments Tue, 07 May 2013 17:00:50 -0400 http://observer.com/2013/05/mind-vacations/ Matthew Kassel http://observer.com/?p=298918

Ava Gardner's posthumous tell-all.

IT'S NEVER TOO EARLY to start thinking about summer—and how you might spend your leisure time in that season of possibility. There are getaways to plan, gardens to plot, lighter clothes to purchase. But for whiling away the summer hours, whether on the beach, at poolside or on a park bench, nothing beats the pleasure of a good book. The one downside—sifting through the new releases to find something you like—can be a chore, which is why we’ve gone ahead and done that work for you.

Here’s a carefully selected smattering of forthcoming titles we think you’ll enjoy. There are the juicy confessions of Ava Gardner, a literary werewolf novel and a long-awaited family epic from Afghan writer Khaled Hosseini. And for those who want to get a jump on their summer reading, some of these are just out in stores or downloadable to an iPad or Kindle near you.

FORTY-ONE FALSE STARTS: ESSAYS ON ARTISTS AND WRITERS
By Janet Malcolm
(Out now)

Janet Malcolm, the author of the seminal book of nonfiction The Journalist and the Murderer, among other serious studies, is a keen observer of … well, pretty much everything. In this collection of meditations culled primarily from The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, Ms. Malcolm’s omnivorous mind is on full display as she investigates the cultural significance of figures like J.D. Salinger, Edith Wharton, Thomas Struth and David Salle, the experimental profile of whom gives the book its title.

A DELICATE TRUTH
By John le Carré
(Out now)

A Delicate Truth, about a mysterious counterterror operation on the island of Gibraltar, is the 23rd novel by the great British spy writer John le Carré, whose books have experienced an upsurge in popularity of late. Even if spy novels aren’t your thing, you might still enjoy it. As the editor Robert Gottlieb recently said of Mr. le Carré in The New York Times Magazine, “He’s a brilliant writer for whom spies are merely subject matter.”

RED MOON
By Benjamin Percy
(Out now)

What’s that, you say? A werewolf novel? Well, yes, but don’t mistake this book for anything less than a great literary achievement; Red Moon is, in all likelihood, the most well-written werewolf novel you will come across. It’s the fourth book from Benjamin Percy, a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize whose previous works include a novel, The Wildling, and the short story collections Refresh, Refresh and The Language of Elk.

THE OTHER TYPIST
By Suzanne Rindell
(Out now)

The Other Typist—the first novel by Suzanne Rindell, a doctoral student in American modernist literature at Rice University—is set in Jazz Age Manhattan and told from the point of view of Rose Baker, who works as a reserved and self-regulated typist for a New York City Police Department precinct. “Mine is a silent job,” Rose tells us on the book’s first page. Eventually, though, the raucous spirit of the times catches up with her.

AND THE MOUNTAINS ECHOED
By Khaled Hosseini
(Out May 21)

With the highly anticipated publication of And the Mountains Echoed, Khaled Hosseini, the Afghan-born author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, offers his first novel in five years—a big, sprawling, multi-generational saga that jumps from Europe to America to Pakistan to Afghanistan.

THE FALL OF ARTHUR
By J.R.R. Tolkien
(Out May 23)

J.R.R. Tolkien died in 1973, but his unpublished works are still finding their way to the public. The Fall of Arthur is Mr. Tolkien’s take, in narrative verse, on King Arthur’s final days. Mr. Tolkien never finished the book, edited by his son, Christopher Tolkien, though the terrain he explores promises to be just as fantastical as Middle Earth, the world inhabited by the characters in his The Lord of the Rings trilogy and other works.

ITALIAN WAYS: ON AND OFF THE RAILS FROM MILAN TO PALERMO
By Tim Parks
(Out June 10)

If you can’t go on vacation this summer, let Tim Parks be your virtual guide—or, shall we say, conductor. In this charming book of social inquiry, Mr. Parks, the British expat who has lived in Verona, Italy, for more than 30 years and is a keen observer of Italian culture, takes to the rails to examine, as he simply puts it, “the Italian way of doing things,” which is his perennial fixation.

AVA GARDNER: THE SECRET CONVERSATIONS
By Peter Evans and Ava Gardner
(Out July 2)

The actress Ava Gardner was apparently so uncomfortable with the information she revealed in Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations—co-authored with Peter Evans—that she embargoed its release until after her death. In this steamy memoir, we are treated to a slew of juicy details, especially as they relate to Ms. Gardner’s three ex-husbands: Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra—about whom she is more than willing to dish the dirt post-mortem.

READY FOR A BRAND NEW BEAT: HOW 'DANCING IN THE STREET' BECAME THE ANTHEM FOR A CHANGING AMERICA
By Mark Kurlansky
(Out July 11)

The subjects of Mark Kurlansky’s books—salt, cod and oysters, to name three—are merely vessels through which he advances big and thought-provoking ideas about history and society and the way the world is shaped. In his new book of pop history, Mr. Kurlansky turns his attention to “Dancing in the Street,” the Motown hit first recorded by Martha and the Vandellas that was catapulted into the countercultural cataclysm of mid-1960s America.

LOVE, DISHONOR, MARRY, DIE, CHERISH, PERISH
By David Rakoff
(Out July 16)

David Rakoff died last summer at the age of 47, but he left behind an unpublished novel in verse that took him 10 years to complete and reads like the delightful deadline poetry of Calvin Trillin. Mr. Rakoff was best known for his sad, funny and poignant personal essays, so this work—bits of which he previewed on This American Life, to which he contributed regularly—feels like a departure. But it is, in the end, of a piece with the late author’s whimsical approach.

THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES OF JAMES PURDY
With an introduction by John Waters
(Out July 22)

The first complete assemblage of James Purdy’s short stories, this fat collection features work previously unpublished by the late, great and long-underrated American writer. “James is not for everyone,” the director John Waters concedes in the introduction, but for those who like “funny feel-bad books, he’s been dead center in the black little hearts of provocateur-hungry readers like myself right from the beginning.”

VERY RECENT HISTORY: AN ENTIRELY FACTUAL ACCOUNT OF A YEAR (C. AD 2009) IN A LARGE CITY
By Choire Sicha
(Out August 6)

The title sums it up pretty well. In this book of nonfiction, told in a novelistic way, the inimitable Choire Sicha, a co-founder of The Awl and a former editor of Gawker, details one year in the life of a character named John, a young newspaper reporter in recession-addled New York. If there is a Lost Generation of the 21st century, Mr. Sicha captures it here.

That said, I question the casual use, twice, of the word "goyim," without ital, without quotation marks, to refer to non-Jews. In a piece that shows some sensitivity on the issue of Christians' misunderstanding of Jews (they say we're not forgiving, and that's antisemitic), the use of "goyim" evinces a lack of understanding by Jews of their own situation. The word means "the nation," the gentile world, and has a dash of Boratish wariness and hostility. It is Yiddish, and is not like shlep or chutzpah, that is, an assimilated neutral word. It's a signal to other Jews, Let's talk as landsmen. I think it's arrogant and exclusionary. Jews have large cultural power in America; acting as if we're still some persecuted subgroup is way way beneath us. I gather from one gentile friend that he has friends who feel themselves to be outside the cultural establishment and have appropriated the word "goyim" to refer to themselves, in something of the proud/resentful way that blacks took on the n-word. I know, the cultural valences aren't the same. But it's loaded—why make half your audience feel excluded?

[I note that Wikipedia agrees with me here...]

Of course, last night the Observer broke the news about Rupert Murdoch installing himself as publisher of the NY Post.

And, in The Transom itself, the story of two dogs, one rich, one poor, and the assault that brought them together. Plus, the second item, on Citizens Band, explicates the new sincere downton cabaret.

The summer reading round-up is rather fantastic: Janet Malcolm is reading Great Expectations by Charles Dickens and Daniel Harris' Diary of a Drag Queen. When asked what she liked about the books, she replied, "What's not to like?" Ah, Ms. Malcolm, always the marvel of economy. And Nicholas Kristoff is reading... Harry Potter. And from Frank Gehry: "What makes you think I read?" Indeed.

Also: Thomas Krens takes his apartment off the market. What means this for the museum director's Guggenheimlich future?

He's prolific, too. Over the course of 47 smallish pictures, Mr. Fertig is a remarkably consistent paint-handler, able to sustain pictorial clarity when working with closely valued scumbles of color. His gift for abbreviating form while remaining true to its specifics is stunning. True, some of the paintings do get splotchy; and when he runs a comb through a patch of wet oil, he makes me grit my teeth.

Mr. Fertig transforms influence to singular effect, creating a haunting, uncategorizable art from sources as diverse as Sergei Eisenstein, John Marin, Saul Steinberg, R.B. Kitaj and Gerhard Richter. Tapping into history with uncanny ease, Mr. Fertig shows up painters like John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage and Julie Heffernan for the callow dabblers they are. Like most postmodernists, they can't imagine not pretending. Mr. Fertig, in contrast, loses himself in history's flow, respectful of its authority but refusing to be cowed by it. That's how he manages to put brush to canvas like it's 1809 without straining credulity-it's the place where he lives. And when we're looking at his elusive images, it's a place we don't want to leave.

David Fertig: Paintings is at James Graham and Sons, 1014 Madison Avenue, until Nov. 8.

Penitent Joy

A curmudgeon might describe the collages of Janet Malcolm, currently on display at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, as the extracurricular dalliance of a renowned highbrow journalist-and the curmudgeon would be right. Maybe. Ms. Malcolm crafts small abstract collages from sources mundane (old ledgers, tattered letters), mass-produced (vintage magazines) and charged (Nazi insignia). She's content to tread in the byways of precedent. Kurt Schwitters and Kasimir Malevich-both of whom are acknowledged by name-provide the compositional model; Joseph Cornell and Anne Ryan, the fragile diaristic tone. The ephemeral scraps Ms. Malcolm has collected evoke the troubled culture of early 20th-century Europe. The elegiac tone is unmistakable, as is the gentle knack for suggestive juxtaposition.

Ms. Malcolm takes tempered, almost penitent joy in cutting and pasting. It's as if she were relieved to discover that the optimism inherent in making art, though sorely tried by world events, endures. That's exactly the kind of delicate truth a curmudgeon would miss. The rest of us are free to acknowledge the quiet candor of Ms. Malcolm's accomplishment and give her a hand when occasion merits. Take a close look at the understated beauty of Bible (2003) and Ascension Day (2002) and you'll see occasion merits, and then some.

Janet Malcolm: Collages at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, 50 East 78th Street, No. 2-A, until Nov. 26.

Non-Precious

The Ryan McGinness exhibition at Deitch Projects is notable only as an example of a common phenomenon: The young, ambitious artist happy to piss away his talent for the sake of notoriety. Mr. McGinness overlaps absurdist logos-Viking women, businessmen punctured by safety pins, an intestinal tract as blandly anonymous as a deer-crossing sign-against glossy fields of pungent oil color. He has a knack for organizing his free-floating, ornamental arrangements of icons, and he has a knack for screen printing (he ably manipulates the transparency of the process). What he doesn't have is integrity.

Mr. McGinness' pictures replicate the sterile uniformity of assembly-line product-the Warhol thing again. The maze of mirrors, emblazoned with the artist's signature decals, partakes of the funhouse aesthetic typical of trendy mainstream art. He offers a line of custom-designed skateboards and long-sleeved T-shirts. We're told that his approach provides an "antithesis of the traditional art-world concept of the precious original." A picture by Mr. McGinness can set you back $6,500-that's a chunk of change for non-precious merchandise. Never trust an artist who uses theory as camouflage for his careerist hypocrisy.

Ryan McGinness: Worlds Within Worlds is at Deitch Projects, 76 Grand Street, until Nov. 1.

And Makes Its Home in the PastThe first thing you might think upon entering James Graham and Sons' ground-floor space on Madison Avenue is that the gallery has mounted an overview of an unheralded 19th-century painter, something along the lines of the Walter Gay show seen at the same venue last spring. The pictures of castles, duels, naval battles and soldiers on horseback in full military regalia smack of a pageantry whose time has long gone. The smoky post-Impressionist dabbing-as dense as Vuillard, as yielding as Bonnard-has strong period connotations. Compositional strategies hint at a knowledge of Japanese prints, an important resource for painters like Degas and Whistler. Just as you're about to conclude that you've discovered a mysteriously neglected minor French master, you begin to notice how off the pictures are. Suffused with nostalgia and powered by romance, the paintings surrender to neither; the mood is just short of acerbic and decidedly contemporary. Despite the lusciously applied paint, the work is dry, disinterested. The artist, David Fertig, alive and working somewhere in New Jersey, is a conundrum.

He's prolific, too. Over the course of 47 smallish pictures, Mr. Fertig is a remarkably consistent paint-handler, able to sustain pictorial clarity when working with closely valued scumbles of color. His gift for abbreviating form while remaining true to its specifics is stunning. True, some of the paintings do get splotchy; and when he runs a comb through a patch of wet oil, he makes me grit my teeth.

Mr. Fertig transforms influence to singular effect, creating a haunting, uncategorizable art from sources as diverse as Sergei Eisenstein, John Marin, Saul Steinberg, R.B. Kitaj and Gerhard Richter. Tapping into history with uncanny ease, Mr. Fertig shows up painters like John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage and Julie Heffernan for the callow dabblers they are. Like most postmodernists, they can't imagine not pretending. Mr. Fertig, in contrast, loses himself in history's flow, respectful of its authority but refusing to be cowed by it. That's how he manages to put brush to canvas like it's 1809 without straining credulity-it's the place where he lives. And when we're looking at his elusive images, it's a place we don't want to leave.

David Fertig: Paintings is at James Graham and Sons, 1014 Madison Avenue, until Nov. 8.

Penitent Joy

A curmudgeon might describe the collages of Janet Malcolm, currently on display at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, as the extracurricular dalliance of a renowned highbrow journalist-and the curmudgeon would be right. Maybe. Ms. Malcolm crafts small abstract collages from sources mundane (old ledgers, tattered letters), mass-produced (vintage magazines) and charged (Nazi insignia). She's content to tread in the byways of precedent. Kurt Schwitters and Kasimir Malevich-both of whom are acknowledged by name-provide the compositional model; Joseph Cornell and Anne Ryan, the fragile diaristic tone. The ephemeral scraps Ms. Malcolm has collected evoke the troubled culture of early 20th-century Europe. The elegiac tone is unmistakable, as is the gentle knack for suggestive juxtaposition.

Ms. Malcolm takes tempered, almost penitent joy in cutting and pasting. It's as if she were relieved to discover that the optimism inherent in making art, though sorely tried by world events, endures. That's exactly the kind of delicate truth a curmudgeon would miss. The rest of us are free to acknowledge the quiet candor of Ms. Malcolm's accomplishment and give her a hand when occasion merits. Take a close look at the understated beauty of Bible (2003) and Ascension Day (2002) and you'll see occasion merits, and then some.

Janet Malcolm: Collages at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, 50 East 78th Street, No. 2-A, until Nov. 26.

Non-Precious

The Ryan McGinness exhibition at Deitch Projects is notable only as an example of a common phenomenon: The young, ambitious artist happy to piss away his talent for the sake of notoriety. Mr. McGinness overlaps absurdist logos-Viking women, businessmen punctured by safety pins, an intestinal tract as blandly anonymous as a deer-crossing sign-against glossy fields of pungent oil color. He has a knack for organizing his free-floating, ornamental arrangements of icons, and he has a knack for screen printing (he ably manipulates the transparency of the process). What he doesn't have is integrity.

Mr. McGinness' pictures replicate the sterile uniformity of assembly-line product-the Warhol thing again. The maze of mirrors, emblazoned with the artist's signature decals, partakes of the funhouse aesthetic typical of trendy mainstream art. He offers a line of custom-designed skateboards and long-sleeved T-shirts. We're told that his approach provides an "antithesis of the traditional art-world concept of the precious original." A picture by Mr. McGinness can set you back $6,500-that's a chunk of change for non-precious merchandise. Never trust an artist who uses theory as camouflage for his careerist hypocrisy.

Ryan McGinness: Worlds Within Worlds is at Deitch Projects, 76 Grand Street, until Nov. 1.

"Just go in," a friend once advised when I got called for jury duty, "and say, 'I cannot be rational.' Say, 'I hate criminals, and if they're arrested they're guilty as far as I'm concerned.' And they'll let you go." Most upper-middle-class people pull stunts like this. D. Graham Burnett notes in his account of jury service that 80 percent of his own juror pool asked to be excused when, during voir dire, the judge mentioned sequestration. Roughly half of them waved their hands when the clerk asked-in English-if they were unable to understand English.

Mr. Burnett, a Princeton University historian of science, refused to crap out on his civic duty, even though his profession is one in which concepts like "reasonable doubt" routinely get shot full of epistemological holes. He wound up as the foreman of a jury sitting on a murder trial. Several days of testimony and four days of sequestration (which he describes as "the most intense sixty-six hours of my life") turned him into a sobbing wreck with some strongly held ideas about the on-the-ground workings of our justice system. He lays them out in a slight but snappy book called A Trial by Jury , the gist of which he squeezed into a recent New York Times Magazine cover story.

In August 1998, a gay African-American man was found dead in his West Village apartment with two dozen stab wounds to his chest and back. (Mr. Burnett, who has changed the names of all the case's principals, calls this man "Randolph Cuffee.") The NYPD did what it always does after a stabbing death-it canvassed the city's emergency rooms for patients with hand wounds. They found "Monte Milcray," a young Bronx man who'd nearly severed one of his fingers. His alibi stank. Milcray, who was black, claimed to have used a knife to fend off a gang of white racists during a chase that covered 25 city blocks and left him suspiciously close to Cuffee's apartment. When police tested the overalls Milcray had been wearing, they discovered a mix of his and Cuffee's blood.

So Milcray changed his story to the one he'd more or less stick with for the rest of the trial. He claimed a woman in Union Square had called him "sexy" and invited him to her apartment. When the "woman" disrobed, there was a Crying Game moment. "What the fuck is this?" Milcray said. Cuffee allegedly replied, "Once it gets in, it's not gonna hurt"-and was doing his level best to rape Milcray when the latter reached for the blade he kept strapped to his ankle. Milcray, who was engaged to be married, backtracked on one aspect of the story: He admitted that he'd met Cuffee not on the street but on a dirty-talk phone line. Phone records backed him up; Cuffee was shown in testimony to have run "a small gay escort service." Prosecution and defense differed over whether he himself had ever solicited clients in drag.

Mr. Burnett and his fellow jurors were sent off either to convict Milcray for second-degree murder or to acquit him on grounds of self-defense. There was no middle ground: Either Cuffee had been a rapist or Milcray was a liar. The risk of a not-guilty verdict was that a cold-blooded murderer would be set free, rewarded for a homophobic tall tale. The risk of a guilty verdict was that a law-abiding man would be robbed of his liberty simply for having defended himself against a violent pervert.

Mr. Burnett didn't have much to work with: The other 11 jurors included one egotistical television addict who used deliberation time to discuss how Jews call all the shots in the Dominican Republic, and who was under the impression that the defendant would serve a long jail sentence no matter what verdict they reached; one woman who argued for a compromise verdict because she had a friend who was raped in police custody in Turkey; one interior decorator who argued for a more "sensual" approach to the law; and one "emotionally volatile" control freak who had to be hospitalized when her meds ran out.

To many of his fellow jurors, Mr. Burnett was no great shakes, either. He looked like a snot, reading Wallace Stevens on breaks and taking his notes with a fountain pen that "contained a foppish, tobacco-colored ink." He was an inveterate food sissy, eating only the fruits and nuts and breads he'd stuffed into his knapsack and barely touching the meals served at the hotels near Kennedy and La Guardia where the jurors were bused for the night. And he had, as he himself realizes, a tendency to bloviate and to condescend. "In different circumstances," he wrote in his notebook, "I can imagine having a certain kind of conversation that could bring me around to reject the justification of self-defense. But there are some jurors here who are such idiots, so thoroughly oblivious to good judgment, or so thick (regardless of their intentions), that it seems improper to aid them in depriving a man of his liberty." He began deliberations hoping for a hung jury.

Many readers will be inclined to compare Mr. Burnett's book with that other brief examination of courtroom "truth," Janet Malcolm's The Crime of Sheila McGough (1999). They'll find a paradox. Ms. Malcolm, a more "literary" interpreter of legal narratives, assumes jurors are intoxicated by logic: "Trials are won by attorneys whose stories fit," she writes, "and lost by those whose stories are like the shapeless housecoat that truth, in her disdain for appearances, has chosen as her uniform."

But as a juror, the presumably more "scientific" Mr. Burnett was drawn to illogic and loose ends. The great argument for the truth of Milcray's account, he thought, was its sloppiness. According to Milcray, Cuffee didn't threaten him and didn't even have a weapon. "If he had invented this tale of attempted anal sodomy in an effort to dodge prosecution for a cold-blooded murder, why didn't he have the good sense to embroider his account of the attack in order to make it more obviously life-threatening?" Mr. Burnett asks. "Milcray's story was weak, weaker than it needed to be, weaker than a calculated lie would have been. It was, in the end, improbable enough to leave the distinct impression of truth."

Still, it was not just truth's shapeless housecoat that made Mr. Burnett's fellow jurors vote unanimously for acquittal on the fourth morning of deliberations; most of them still suspected that Milcray had done something wrong. It was, rather, the annoying experience of sequestration that showed them the rationale behind the notion of "reasonable doubt." They had been put off by the cops who "exuded a palpable sense of armed delight" as the courtroom cleared; by the overzealous prosecutor, whose idea of a question was: "And didn't you then-like this!-stab him? And then-again!-like this? As he tried to crawl away? And-again!"; and by the blowhard judge, who dressed down Mr. Burnett for stretching his legs and threatened another juror with contempt of court for not looking at him while he was speaking, before concluding his performance with a sneering lecture about how jury duty "was by no means a service comparable in scope to that which had been demanded of the men of his generation."

Doing his duty taught Mr. Burnett a sobering lesson: "[T]he burden of proof was so high exactly because the state was so powerful ," he writes. "[T]he state could take control of your person, it could refuse to let you go home, it could send men with guns to watch you take a piss, it could deny you access to a lawyer, it could embarrass you in public and force you to reply meekly, it could, ultimately, send you to jail-all this, apparently, without even accusing you of a crime."

And it could withhold evidence. It's easy enough to find the actual case Mr. Burnett is describing-the killing of the 36-year-old Fitzroy Green by 21-year-old computer programmer Eric Carolina in the wee hours of Aug. 18, 1998. The Carolina/Milcray story is backed by plenty of evidence that the jurors were not permitted to hear. Green/Cuffee was indeed a transvestite prostitute-and with a record of violence. In 1997, according to the New York Post , Green "was accused of cutting off a john's pinky finger after the customer got angry when he discovered Green was only masquerading as a woman."

It was, in short, a narrow escape from a miscarriage of justice. It is to Mr. Burnett's credit that he leaves out this clarifying material. The reader passes through the book blinkered in the same way a jury is blinkered-and finishes it with gratitude to Graham Burnett for having brought his fellow panelists around to his own anti-authoritarian intuitions.

Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at the Weekly Standard.

Does the law require you to be wary of a man who sends you flowers? Must you ask why when a convicted felon wants to use your bank account to receive a wire transfer? Is giving your fellow man the benefit of the doubt (also known as generosity of spirit) a crime?

Yes, according to the verdict in The Crime of Sheila McGough , Janet Malcolm's seventh book, a beautifully written and tautly argued meditation-provocation on the law. The book is meant to reverse that court verdict, but it also subverts in a broader sense because it challenges our assumptions about what a story-a legal argument, a journalist's account, party gossip-must be.

The events, as narrated by Ms. Malcolm: In 1990, Sheila McGough (pronounced Mc- Guff ), a Washington, D.C., lawyer, was convicted of 14 felony counts in a Federal court and sentenced to three years in prison. The main charge was that she failed to keep in her attorney trust account $75,000 sent to her by a business associate of one of her clients. Instead, she followed her client's instructions and gave him the money, less $5,000 he owed her in legal fees. The business associate objected, sued and a settlement was reached. Three years later, the Government went after Ms. McGough. This is the surprising part: Even in an era when a President risks impeachment for lying in a civil suit, a case like this is unusual. There are so many exculpatory possibilities. Perhaps Ms. McGough made an innocent error. She was just out of law school. Perhaps her client tricked her. Send her to bar counseling or turn her over to Judge Judy. But disbarment and three years' time?

This is the sort of story Ms. Malcolm is drawn to. She likes to report on normal-seeming professionals-psychoanalysts, journalists, biographers-who turn out to have a complicated relationship with the truth. She pulls back the white collar to reveal the ring. Our soothsayers are not frauds, but they turn out to be fabulators. For them there is no truth, only story. To be able to determine the narrative shape of people's lives is intoxicating, and once they have tasted this power, they want more: new lives to reconfigure. Which involves them in something like seduction. The psychoanalyst buries himself in his "impossible profession." The journalist becomes "a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness." The biographer is like "the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers." In her new book, lawyers get their turn.

Here's some information the prosecutors made much of at the trial. Ms. McGough's client, Bob Bailes, had a history of fraud. She knew this. She also knew he often had no fixed business address and sometimes worked out of his car. Any fool could see that Bailes, who died in 1995, was a lifelong con man. Why couldn't Ms. McGough see it? The prosecution had an explanation: Bailes sent Ms. McGough flowers. This detail clinched the case. Here was a story the whole jury knew: Ms. McGough was a lonely woman, on her way to spinsterhood, lured into participating in crime by a practiced con man.

Ms. Malcolm rejects that story. She goes through the evidence and re-interviews the participants and makes Ms. McGough's case again. She finds evidence of false testimony and tampered-with documents. In large measure, she convinces you that the crime of Sheila McGough was no crime. The story the prosecution told was wrong.

For a writer of Ms. Malcolm's searching intelligence, this isn't enough of a challenge. For her, the real question isn't why justice miscarried. Justice gets botched a hundred times a day. The question is: Why Ms. McGough? If an error in handling an escrow fund doesn't usually land you in jail, why this time? If this book is to be believed, the strange and very Malcolm-ian answer is that Ms. McGough was guilty of non-narratability. She refused to turn her actions into a credible story. She was, Ms. Malcolm notes, both "almost preternatural[ly] honest" and "maddeningly tiresome and stubborn." I am who I am, in all my contradictions, Ms. McGough offered, I am true to life. The jury voted to convict on a Wednesday in late November-with time left over to do their Thanksgiving shopping.

Ms. Malcolm wants us to know that The Crime of Sheila McGough is as much an artifact as the crime of Sheila McGough. She reminds the reader that she has the hammer and the nails. She tells when she catches a cab, grabs a train, grows irritated or bored or skeptical, or runs out of tape. It is a style that has become ubiquitous among smarter feature journalists, and I blame her for that. She is great at it, though, the best. That's the construction job. Now for the seduction.

The journalist focuses on the subject; the subject experiences the exhilaration of being the center of the journalist's intense, quasi-erotic attention. Since she spelled out the dynamic so superbly in the now famous opening to The Journalist and the Murderer , I'll call it Malcolm's Law. Here it is again: "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. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns-when the article or book appears- his hard lesson." This appears to shed light. Janet Malcolm casts herself in the role of a Bob Bailes. She is a con artist writing about a con artist and his dupe.

Perhaps. But Ms. Malcolm is like one of those velociraptors in Jurassic Park . She is always learning, testing for weaknesses. Could there be an exception to Malcolm's Law? She didn't see one when she wrote The Journalist and the Murderer . The key word was "every": every journalist, every subject. Joe McGinniss seduced and betrayed Jeffrey MacDonald. The critics, against her protests, added that in In the Freud Archives , Janet Malcom seduced and betrayed Jeffrey Masson (note all those J.M.'s). But what if the subject were so egoless, so innocent, that the seduction-betrayal dynamic short-circuited? What if a virgin were found who could resist the lure of narrative, who could hold at bay that "lumbering prehistoric beast that knocks over everything in its path as it makes its way through the ancient forest of basic plots"?

The description of the first meeting with Ms. McGough, at a downtown Manhattan coffeeshop, is a delight, Ms. Malcolm in full flower, full of surprising observations and quick slits with the analytic knife. Ms. McGough, she writes, "was small and blonde and pretty, and her voice was fresh and girlish, formed for phrases like 'Gee whillikers!' and inflected by habits of unremitting good sportsmanship. She looked younger than her 54 years. Prison had evidently not broken or marked her. With her pale, translucent skin and single-strand pearl necklace and decorous navy-blue suit, she might have been the director of a small foundation or a corporate wife from Scarsdale, in town for a matinee. She talked almost uninterruptedly for the two hours of our meeting.… [But she] was not interested in telling a plausible and persuasive and interesting story. She was out for the bigger game of imparting a great number of wholly accurate and numbingly boring facts."

Ms. Malcolm pursues the romance, anyway, going down to Washington, visiting her home, maneuvering to open Ms. McGough up for study. But Ms. McGough doesn't recognize what's going on. She believes in truth, not narrative. "The journalistic subject is normally someone with a story to tell; you might even say to sell," Ms. Malcolm writes. "With Sheila, the task, on the contrary, was to try to coax a story from the morass of her guileless and incontinent speech." The verbal clutter drives Ms. Malcolm crazy. "With Sheila there has never been any question of enjoyment," she writes, describing theirs as "the most abstinent of any journalistic relationship I have known." Ms. McGough is committing a new crime: She is wasting the journalist's time, just as she wasted the court's. If she were the jury, Ms. Malcolm would convict. But by the end of the book, a different feeling emerges, one of admiration: Ms. McGough "has settled into my imagination as an exquisite heroine," Ms. Malcolm writes, all the same happy to be rid of her. "When I think of [her], I am awed by her disdain for the disguises for self-interest that the world offers us so it can get its business done."

It may seem that this is too neat, that the story of the story hides a different moral. Perhaps Ms. McGough outbluffed Ms. Malcolm, perhaps she was guilty after all. Or, alternatively, Ms. Malcolm's lust cooled. Perhaps in the end a roué is relieved to find a girl who doesn't know or care about sex-and the journalist a subject indifferent to narrative.