Seeing things differently is the essence of what sets Malcolm apart. Few writers pay attention with the precision, acuity and patience she has exhibited during her career ... These 18 pieces are organized into three unnamed parts, but they conspire to form a meaningful whole ... Taking no particular issue with the work of her colleagues, I wish nonetheless to say that Malcolm, line to line, is a more revealing writer, one whose presence in her pieces isn’t meant to advertise the self so much as complicate the subject. And also, line to line, she is a better writer ... [The final section of the book is] devoted to Malcolm’s superb literary criticism... we are fortunate to have Malcolm’s kind of authority, one founded as much on her failures as on her successes at seeing.
Every word of Janet Malcolm’s latest nonfiction collection, Nobody’s Looking at You, is a pleasure to read, even if you have no built-in interest in her topics. The author of 'The Journalist and the Murderer' comes off like a proponent of the 'Life is short, eat dessert first' philosophy, placing her snappiest pieces in the first section ... [The essays] show off Malcolm’s way with quick, vivid word pictures...and her gift for the telling detail ... [and] reveal the breadth of Malcolm’s wit and insight[.]
[Malcolm's] new collection is a reminder that she is a great champion ... She is drawn to decency, cleanliness, sanity, simplicity—these words recur in her work like talismans, when she writes about Edith Wharton or the biographer Quentin Bell. Goodness, but of a narrow kind, matters intensely to her. Malcolm is impatient with weakness and a lack of self-control—with people who 'leak.' The goodness that attracts her is born of strength, reserve and resources. It is tangled up with tastefulness, too ... There is stirring, beautifully structured writing here, particularly in the title essay, a profile of Fisher, which combines many of the writer’s signal interests—our unconscious aggression and the way we methodically and unknowingly recreate the world of our childhood in our adult lives ... Several pieces, however, particularly the short reviews, make for intimate but curiously unsatisfying reading ... too often in this book we watch a powerful critic taking on targets that feel unworthy—not because they are small but because she does not elevate them or make a sufficient case for their importance. She flatters them instead, bathes them in adjectives ... With all due respect to both Maddow and Malcolm, I started to feel a little insane.
It would be frightening to be interviewed by Janet Malcolm. But the same qualities that make her such a fearsome interlocutor also lend her essays an uncommon clarity ... Malcolm brings [the] same moral seriousness to every topic she addresses ... Yes, Malcolm can be unforgiving. But her calm, brilliant essays are the perfect tonic for our troubled times.
At a certain point in her new collection Nobody's Looking at You, pulling together previously uncompiled essays, Janet Malcolm fails — and it's fascinating ... Nobody's Looking At You is brimful of all the eloquence, erudition and insight a thoughtful reader could want. Now, if it had just a touch more steel...
Malcolm is not the nicest writer, but she is far from the least nice ... Readers thrill or recoil not at what she says, but at the certain feeling that she could say much worse. Restraint is her drama. Perversity is her mood. Beauty and justice have in common a symmetry which the perverse among us seek to upset. Malcolm’s most beautiful writing is about childhood ... In Malcolm’s latest essays, Malcolm emerges unexpectedly as someone to call (in the millennial idiom, facetious but sweet) 'Mom.' More tender, her observations a little off ... A 2016 essay on translations of Anna Karenina is the greatest source of pleasure in this collection; being both a typically gloves-off examination of an ill-fated subject—the husband-and-wife team responsible for making a number of Russian masterpieces too easy to read—and a playful denuding of the point.
Malcolm always has been very good at writing about innovative thinkers. But as we’ve learned over the course of her sterling career, the New Yorker staffer is even more compelling when she aims to debunk a piece of conventional wisdom ... the spirit that animates Malcolm at her most daring is often present. If an essay’s aim is to provide readers with a new angle on a subject they thought they understood — or didn’t think they cared about in the first place —Malcolm is definitely a master of the form. But her perspicacity doesn’t mean she’s immune from missteps. Some of her assertions are dubious, and she can be uncharitable to those she’s writing about. To read Malcolm is to be dazzled by her intelligence — and, every so often, puzzled by her misjudgments ... always engaging, if not always right ... Malcolm, a vital voice in American nonfiction since the 1960s, is an intensely original thinker, and sometimes she misses the mark. More often, though, her essays are novel and bracing. This collection reminds us that she’s almost always a must-read.
...ruthlessly artful ... For readers safely on the sidelines, however, her magazine profiles of noted personalities are peerless when it comes to unraveling what makes people tick. She’ll deliver the factual goods with brisk efficiency, while happily leaving mysteries in place ... That candor has its comic side — but it also means the essays are as much about the strategies Malcolm employs as the information she extracts from her subjects ... Nobody’s Looking at You includes more general reportage...and some savvy literary think pieces.
If the book disappoints in places it is perhaps because the subjects of Malcolm’s profiles have grown less colorful in that time ... Malcolm’s real or affected surprise at [a subject's] jargon—see also a tin-eared and dated piece about the tonal perils of email—is the more deflating because she has been so often so good at paying attention to the lures and revelations of her subjects’ language. There remain, however, the considerable pleasures, and the significance, of Malcolm’s own language ... Such is Malcolm’s unsparing attention to the grotesquerie of the hearings that you long to know what she would have written, had she chosen to, about Brett Kavanaugh ... She has always been at her best in a room—artist’s studio, courtroom, or analyst’s office—setting out to describe a stranger and his or her motivations. Nobody’s Looking at You contains enough of that version of Malcolm—spending time with the aged owners of the Argosy Bookshop in New York, or attending the last broadcast by radio veteran George Jellinek—to make it a graceful (albeit nostalgic) successor to Forty-One False Starts.
Malcolm is the undisputed queen of description ... Two excellent pieces on Anna Karenina remind us what a deeply intelligent literary critic Malcolm is ... Reading Malcolm on [Jonathan] Bate’s book...feels flimsy, compared to the heft of The Silent Woman, and Bate—along with some of the other subjects here—unworthy of Malcolm’s attention ... the more I read, the more something felt off. Malcolm herself—her fame and her critical prowess—increasingly became the elephant in the room ... Malcolm’s still one of the smartest critics writing today, but one leaves this book feeling that her best pieces sadly didn’t make the cut.
It’s no surprise that Malcolm covers a lot of ground in her latest collection, Nobody’s Looking At You. The book includes in-depth looks at fashion designer Eileen Fisher and pianist Yuja Wang, as well as pieces that skim the surface—but entertainingly and insightfully—of subjects as unlikely as the 'No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency' books of Alexander McCall Smith ... Although each of the 18 essays selected for the book first appeared elsewhere, the essays gain import when read in tandem—the mark of a well-picked selection. Readers can hopscotch between essays according to their interest level ... Malcolm is attuned to small details that add liveliness to an essay ... The writer missteps when her curiosity is replaced by partisanship; her quite effusive profile of MSNBC personality Rachel Maddow, and her largely condescending piece on former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, are likely to appeal only to those in agreement with Malcolm’s opinions.
The title essay of her last book, Forty-One False Starts (2014), was a brilliant circling of the painter David Salle. There is nothing quite that substantial or penetrating in the present volume, which is made up of profiles, book reviews, reportage, appreciations and take-downs, but Malcolm is always worth reading; it can be instructive to see how much satisfying craft she brings to even the most trivial article ... In her own profiles, Malcolm—herself aware of how journalists can traduce their subjects—minds her manners, occasionally trying to probe some possible tension and immediately retreating when the subject stonewalls. The result is a series of stand-offs between blandly self-approving, mildly self-critical semi-celebrities and stymied interrogator. If the subject’s self-presentation is not challenged, a magazine profile can degenerate into a press release or a fan’s notes. Consequently, the form does not elicit the best from Malcolm, since her strongest suit is psychological probing ... In the book reviews and polemics that constitute the last two-thirds of Nobody’s Looking at You, Malcolm is able to let loose. At times she can sound brutal, as when she does a hatchet job on the pair of translators who have attempted to supplant Constance Garnet ... a collection that veers between tenderness and asperity.
If Janet Malcolm is the thinking woman’s Joan Didion, then Nobody’s Looking at You is her Slouching Towards Bethlehem: a lot less slouching ... The range is impressive, if slightly humourless and bewildering ... two long articles about Tolstoy which show Malcolm off at her formidable, straight-talking best ... Vanity, masochism, arrogance? Who knows the motives of the rich and the famous? Certainly not the rich and the famous—and maybe not even Janet Malcolm, who often seems to come away from her interviews as puzzled by her subjects as they are. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe that’s the appeal ... Her other great skill is focusing on odd and unexpected details and offering them up as vague, conclusive metaphors ... Fearless, curious, endlessly entertaining: would that we were all so stupid and full of ourselves.
Her specialty is the discrepancy between self-image and reality, but she doesn’t watch only to pounce. Malcolm also can be a sincere praise-singer and is happy to admire ... Malcolm does not scorn surfaces. She assumes that we all live in a world of appearances and that the look of things—a room, an outfit—is of interest ... Malcolm is fair, and excellent company. Nobody’s Looking at You is a thrilling book, studded with sharp perceptions and images.
Malcolm is on the case and the crackle of her intelligence creates The Zone. Every pip, creak, twang is whipped into her handbag to be taken out later and re-examined under what? A microscope begged from NASA? ... The essay on Yuja Wang is a fascinating, over-detailed portrait of a child prodigy and her ascent into world fame ... Malcolm is in thrall to high-culture and cleverness, her own and others. When she forgets herself, the beauty of her perception flourishes and it is the best company ... She also writes gloriously about literature ... her vivid essay [on Norman Podhoretz] made me buy the book [Making It]. For that alone I kiss her tiny well-maintained hand.
Janet Malcolm’s subtle snark is more like the swipe of a cat’s claws than the barking dogs of contemporary media. Her essay collection, Nobody’s Looking at You, has no unifying theme beyond her unassuming-yet-willing-to-draw-blood sensibility ... Reading Malcolm is a pleasure for the quiet force of her intelligence.
Nobody’s Looking at You is...double-edged as a label, pointing to a number of salient themes that tie the whole book together: self-effacement, invisibility, exhibitionism and integrity ... There are moments when Malcolm’s dedication to her own style seems at odds with the constraints of journalism. But nearly everything is here for good reason, with the best pieces reading like short stories ... One of the seemingly workaday, perfunctory profiles, 'The Emigre’ (2004), on Jellinek, astonishingly salvages itself in its final paragraphs ... It’s a rare glimpse of emotion, elegy, frailty and slanted self-reflection that trembles with the weight that it carries.
[An] outstanding collection ... With no weak selections and several strikingly prescient ones, this collection shows its author as a master of narrative nonfiction.
