The Greatest

Looking over my notes for this career-spanning essay on Janet Malcolm, I find many of them less helpful than I hoped, consisting as they do mostly of phrases like “hell yeah,” “absolutely beautiful,” “brilliant writing,” “so so so perfect,” “how does she do it,” and so forth. Practitioners of a certain type of literary nonfiction speak her name in hushed tones and with a sense of holy awe. Katie Roiphe, who has quite consciously positioned herself as Malcolm’s inheritor, called her “the only living writer who terrified me.” Her New Yorker colleague Louis Menand, normally the picture of Yankee pragmatism, displayed uncharacteristic fanboyishness when asked about Malcolm, referring to her as his “idol.” “To read Malcolm remaking the profile,” wrote Wyatt Mason of the New York Times Book Review, “is both a lesson for readers (I am learning so much!) and a tacit reproach to fellow practitioners (I am wasting my life!).”