Liars and Saints

What I'm Reading:  Laura Zigman, "Small World . " This is a book about two adult siblings who reunite after divorce. In childhood, these girls were neglected; a third daughter had serious developmental issues, and there wasn't enough love to go around.  Zigman's brilliant plot has the sisters sharing space uneasily--until rude neighbors open up an illegal yoga studio upstairs. That's actually the novel. Loud noises from the yoga studio cause various family crises--and the sisters find that they must begin to talk to each other. I've never read a book like this; I really felt for these (fictional) people. Boynton, "Blue Hat, Green Hat." This is about a turkey who can't wear clothing in a proper way. He puts shoes on his head; he wears a coat on his beak. And that's the entire story; he doesn't learn anything. He forgets to strip to his skivvies before throwing himself in a deep, deep pool. I think I love this turkey as much as I love...

 First, RIP, Janet Malcolm, one of my all-time favorite writers. You can re-read a Malcolm book several times and not get bored. It's a little bit shocking how many now-classic books she wrote. My favorites are: "Psychoanalysis," "The Journalist and the Murderer," "The Silent Woman," "In the Freud Archives," and "Iphigenia in Forest Hills." I also loved Malcolm's short piece, "Thoughts on Autobiography from an Abandoned Autobiography": https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2010/03/25/thoughts-on-autobiography-from-an-abandoned/ ....And, lastly, Malcolm's thoughts on email: "Pandora's Click," https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2007/09/27/pandoras-click/ OK, that aside, just an idea here about kids' books. "This Is Not My Hat," by Jon Klassen, won the Caldecott a few years ago. It's about a scheming fish. The little fish came upon a sleeping, giant fish, and admired the hat on that fish. So a th...

"The Shrink Next Door" concerns a man, Marty, with boundary issues. Marty has just ended things with a girlfriend, and she wants reparations. Specifically, she wants a Mexico vacation once promised to her. Marty is so "at sea" that he believes he still owes this person a trip to Mexico. The Mexico discussion seems to be the "inciting event" -- the thing that gets Marty into therapy. But he hasn't just chosen any old therapist; he has chosen Ike, a charismatic licensed psychiatrist and con man who basically takes over his life. Ike seems to make Marty fire his own sister. (The sister is problematic in her own ways, inventing her own hours, using work time to chat on the phone, but the podcast doesn't fully get into that.) As a juvenile form of retaliation, the sister goes to Zurich and robs a bank--takes, from Marty, possessions that an ancestor had left behind. Here, Marty does something even more shocking: He severs relations with both his...

"The Journalist and the Murderer," by Janet Malcolm. This is one of my all-time favorite books. It concerns a case in which a convicted murderer, Jeff MacDonald, went after his biographer, a loathsome man called Joe McGinnis. The problem was that McGinnis had led MacDonald to believe all was well; MacDonald thought he would get a sympathetic profile from McGinnis; the actual profile, an attack on MacDonald, came as a shock. Malcolm uses this case to examine *all* journalism. Isn't there something weird about an interview? Isn't the writer looking to pierce through the subject's self-presentation and get at an actual, unflattering truth? (Famously, one of Malcolm's subjects, in this book, says, "I teach at a low-income university because it's noble; I could be at Harvard or Yale, but that wouldn't make as much of an impact." Malcolm can't let this pass. "Did you get offers from Harvard and Yale?" Immediately, the subject realiz...

"A Sea of Troubles," by Donna Leon . I have reservations about almost every Leon book. Her interest in the actual crime sometimes seems minimal. The murder sometimes seems like a mere coat rack; Leon has it there, but she is more interested in various colorful "coats"--digressions about food, or about office politics--that she can hang on it. That's true in "A Sea of Troubles," and, as is often the case, I can't quite follow all the thinly-sketched men who may be involved, or not involved, in the central conspiracy. But I enjoy Guido at the dinner table with his family, weathering interruptions, sometimes failing to model the behavior he wants to see from his own children. And I like the subtext: Leon, more than many writers, understands that the thing a character says is not quite the thing a character means. Over and over, you sense a murky layer underneath the thing you're actually reading about--and that murky layer is pretty consistently...

The title of Malcolm's new book--"Nobody's Looking at You"--is taken from the rants of an embittered Catholic mom. It's Eileen Fisher's mom--Eileen Fisher, the well-known clothing designer. Fisher's mom wanted to encourage a sense of self-effacement, so whenever Eileen would get a bit self-satisfied, Mom would scowl and say, Nobody's looking at you. In other words: Don't be vain. Don't think you're somebody. Nobody is looking at you. Malcolm--of course--takes this sentence in another direction. In her hands, the sentence seems to mean this: Everyone around you is lost in a kind of fog. So when people look at you, they really see their parents, or their children, or their spouse. They take their own inner dramas and project them onto you. So rest assured that people don't really see you. They look at you--but they don't look at *you* .... One of my favorite recent bits of Malcolm-the-contrarian greatness is this: She was asked, i...

"Thoughts on Autobiography from an Abandoned Autobiography" I have been aware, as I write this autobiography, of a feeling of boredom with the project. My efforts to make what I write interesting seem pitiful. My hands are tied, I feel. I cannot write about myself as I write about the people I have written about as a journalist. To these people I have been a kind of amanuensis: they have dictated their stories to me and I have retold them. They have posed for me and I have drawn their portraits. No one is dictating to me or posing for me now. That's Janet Malcolm. What's extraordinary about this opening? Several things. First, a piece of writing needs conflict; without some kind of tension, we aren't going to be thrilled and drawn along. Malcolm couldn't find colorful antagonists in her own autobiography draft; she wasn't spearheading dragons. But she still found something worth saying. It was in the strange war she was having with herself . Denying, a...