Superb ... How could a writer so famously, effectively skeptical of subjective stories write an autobiography? Malcolm solves the problem with characteristic elegance: Nearly every short chapter of Still Pictures is headed by a grainy black-and-white photograph, whose calls to memory she heeds, repels and bargains with in turn by subtle turn. Her comfort with incompleteness becomes a virtue ... Most of this memoir consists of appreciative and often very dryly funny memories of her devoted, literate family ... Still Pictures has the clarity and brevity of a book by a writer who knows that time is short, and that there’s much to say, much to convey, which will otherwise be lost forever ... A lot gets lost in that transition, Malcolm argues in this final, splendid, most personal work of her long career. A lot — but not everything.
[Malcolm's] choice to turn to autobiography in her last book, Still Pictures, is so intriguing. From the moment you open it, the book does not present itself as a conventional memoir ... It feels as if she is almost tricking herself into it, as if writing a memoir is something that sort of happened to her while cleaning out a shelf or an attic ... Somehow, without a reader even quite realizing it, Malcolm’s memoir slips into being a commentary on memoir ... For Malcolm obsessives, of whom there are many, these are intriguing glimpses of her life, but they are only glimpses ... Ending with a photograph that means nothing to her, or means something because it means nothing, is the final subversion of her profound and mischievous scrapbook ... One is still left with a mystery, though. Why did Malcolm write an autobiography when the form vexed and repelled her? ... She was not one to resist a challenge. She liked inventing or remaking forms. She thrived on the meticulous solving of aesthetic problems.
A characteristically Malcolmian work, reflecting on and resisting the conventions of the form in which she writes. It is built around a series of photographs ... The approach feels deceptively simple, even obvious. But it cleverly allows her to avoid imposing a singular narrative on her life ... She contemplates the difficulties of memoir-writing, of making a narrative from uncertain recollections. In short, her story is—as always—the construction of the story. Malcolm’s trick is to undo the knots in a narrative by discussing them directly. The knots then become her subject, and they are inevitably interesting ... Malcolm was always present in her writing, but she remained a slightly mysterious presence. Part of the pleasure of this memoir is simply in getting to know her a little bit more ... The other part is in reading new sentences by Janet Malcolm. They land like the opening lines of classic novels—hard, shining, immovable truths.
There is nothing tedious about Still Pictures, Malcolm's elegant workaround to the beefs with autobiography. By revisiting old photographs of people and events that shaped her life, she comes at memoir indirectly, through others' stories ... [An] evocative and distinctive final book — an unusually succinct and thought-provoking personal memoir that manages to capture so much of what made Janet Malcolm so unfailingly interesting.
I was charmed and lulled by Malcolm’s late-in-life memoirish turn: mostly half-remembered reminiscences of her family, childhood, and adolescence ... If Malcolm occasionally enjoyed putting things over on her readers, are we meant to be on alert for further mischief from the grave? I find the prospect cheering ... Malcolm wishing to claim her final resting place in 'the annals of horsing around' for pulling off the found photo prank does leave me wondering how much other mischief she planted in plain sight, then had a secret chortle over.
As she notes in Still Pictures, the slim book that is her last, it is a novelistic enterprise, and not to be trusted. Memory is patchy and partial. What does this or that story prove? The answer is: almost nothing, in the end. The gold is 'dross' ... While Still Pictures is slight in the hand...it has the weight of veracity, even if not always precisely candid ... Malcolm’s charm in Still Pictures comprises, for me, a particular charmlessness – an absolute refusal to pose – and it’s this that makes the book worth reading, even if it doesn’t rank among her masterpieces.
Dense, unadorned, and casually confessional about the truth of the truth ... Malcolm is not unwilling to discuss the details of her life; it may have simply been the memory of her parents that forestalled the act of writing a memoir. They appear nowhere in her work as they do here.
The very best chapters are those which reprise the unmistakable voice of her brilliant profile of the artist David Salle...to ask: What does the viewer project onto an image? What is true? And exactly how much distance is necessary to see objectively? Malcolm deconstructs the mystique of images so astutely here that it’s hard to believe she was battling cancer at the time, and would soon lose that fight. In the afterword, written by her daughter, Anne Malcolm, we learn that she didn’t get to finish all she intended, and the book was compiled chronologically on her behalf. The pages are honest and vivid, and show Janet Malcolm once again recording life like no one else.
The book is a collection of short personal essays, each responding to different snapshots. At first glance the book looks like a memoir—or an autobiography, the word Malcolm would have preferred. But the pictures offer a more nuanced reading ... Those who have accused Malcolm of being brutal and cold will find in this book yet another example of her “pitiless prose.” For them Still Pictures will be a failed memoir, and that may be a fair assessment. However, if one reads it as a work of criticism, another possibility opens up.
Informed by photos, diaries, and letters from the family archive, the twenty-six essays in Still Pictures offer riffs on Freud and psychoanalysis, members of the Czech community in New York, teenage lovesickness and grown-up adultery, the performance art of courtroom testifying, the strangeness of memory, and, most significantly, the imagination-charging power of family snapshots. But where is the self-interrogation, the personal narrative? ... Foregrounds her discerning journalistic eye rather than a first-person autobiographical voice ... Malcolm’s rigorous, extensive writing on literature and psychoanalysis, and her idiosyncratic talent for metaphor play in concert to deliver critical wisdom ... Malcolm’s strongest writing here is about her parents ... Both the prefatory and closing pages provide excellent guidance for thinking through Still Pictures.
A gorgeous book and a weird book, and as you read it, you don’t know why she decided to write about this seemingly trivial moment growing up, or that couple rather than this other couple who were friends of her parents and fellow Czech escapees from Hitler. You don’t care why ... There are dozens of passages I could have picked out that are as moving or sharp or funny or reflective of the world Malcolm grew up in as these I’ve gathered. Malcolm writes in two time frames, lending the book its coherence and intimacy.
There are traps of autobiography beyond tedium. Excessive nostalgia, sentiment or fogeyism are a few. Yet strip them all out and you lose the soul. What leavens Still Pictures throughout is Czech humour that, in its irreverence and intolerance for pomposity, is similar to Australian wit ... Unfinished though it is, Still Pictures is an apt completion of these pursuits, its author inhabiting the negative space surrounded by characters, stories and photos. The result is anything but tedious.
There is a great deal more in Still Pictures than pointed assessments of personality based on appearance or style of being. Malcolm has surely revealed in Still Pictures something essential and vexed about herself and her written or writing 'I'.
A memoir which seeks to be classified otherwise, shelved elsewhere, subjected to another kind of reading ... The choreography of telegraph, retention and release across her narratives; her eye for the banal as much as the absurd, subtextually compelling detail; the stately weight and balance of her sentences; as well as her capacity for cruelty, have led some to imagine Malcolm, albeit at her own implicit invitation, as an artist in the cut of Highsmith, or Chekhov, or James ... Interesting, pleasurable.
It occurs to me now that so much of what satisfies readers is a flat, nicely worded surface description or else a bold, two-dimensional statement of an unreflective position. They don’t care too much whether the writer looks beyond the obvious or questions why people are the way they are or whether they are really the way they appear ... So in the spirit of Malcolm — I think I have now realised why I recommend her to young writers. Not because it will do their careers any good to write like that — it probably won’t — but because that’s what I want to read.
Although the book’s episodic narrative is addictive – like scrolling a timeline on your phone (another person’s) – eventually it unspools in meandering and repetition, ending with score-settling regarding her libel trial ... Still Pictures reads a bit like a public therapy session: she is getting things off her chest to make peace with her origins. You wonder what her family would have made of it were they alive to see her airing their dirty laundry. In any case, and whether you’re familiar with her work or not, this memoir will make you think about your own family’s internal myths.
Some pieces of the past are irretrievable, with the people who could fill in the blanks now gone; other details are intentionally held back. Malcolm teases us with their absence ... Still Pictures bucks the confessional mode we have come to expect from memoirs since the proliferation of the genre in the 1990s. But it doesn’t much matter that the pixels Malcolm chooses to share form an incomplete portrait. Like the bulk of her life’s work, at its heart is an inquiry into the elusiveness of truth. Although it may be her in the viewfinder, the real subject is the unreliability of the camera.
Malcolm’s final book is billed as a memoir. In fact it has much in common with her muted, enigmatic book of photographs, Burdock (2008), which consisted of 28 pictures of individual burdock leaves and a two-page essay ... If you’re already a Malcolm fan, the first half of this elegant book might feel like your favourite band choosing a little-known B-side track for an encore. They troop off to polite cheers — before bounding straight back on with one of their greatest hits.
There is little in this book about Malcolm’s adult life and career, which is the basis of our interest in her in the first place. She’s much more comfortable offering interesting trivialities about her early life than examining the decisions and contradictions that constituted her remarkable career ... We are left to treat Malcolm as the patient on the couch, free-associating at random, while we readers play analyst ... Malcolm’s beat was examining the stories people tell and figuring out what those stories might reveal about the tellers. For pitiless, clear-eyed Malcolmian insight on her life and influences, her career and its contradictions, we’ll have to wait for someone willing to consider what her refusal, or inability, to tell her own story reveals about her.
After my review copy of Still Pictures arrived in my mailbox, I jumped right in and started gulping it down. But suddenly, I couldn’t continue. I went to my bookshelves and found myself pulling down Malcolm’s other book ... While I relished the Malcolm of books past, Still Pictures languished on my nightstand ... Still Pictures is deeply personal, and Malcolm is not afraid to say that this kind of writing does not come naturally to her ... The most affecting of these pieces cover the experience of other Czech refugees making new lives in New York ... A sense of paralyzing agony runs through every piece — if not physical then cerebral ... The failures of this book are what give it its weight ... Readers looking for the cutting and flinty Malcolm of earlier books will not find her here. There is something else, more subtle but perhaps more important, about our inability to capture our own 'still pictures' of our lives.
Rather wondrous, revealing fascinating and confounding glimpses of an extraordinary life ... Some of the sketches feel frustratingly inconclusive. Nevertheless, simply by trying to describe the photos accurately and capture the complicated cloud of feelings they evoke, Malcolm offers up a vivid portrait of Malcolm, almost in spite of herself.
Malcolm, a former photography critic for the New Yorker and an accomplished photographer, uses family pictures and other images to write about her upbringing and career, and she doles out plenty of the biting and entertaining wit one would expect from a writer of her caliber ... Even in a memoir, Malcolm displays her gift for the cutting remark, as when she admires the 'toughness and self-containment' of today's young women before adding: 'Of course, beneath the surface, they are as pathetic as everyone else.' The result is a caustic, idiosyncratic trip through a singular life of letters.
Before she died in 2021, aged eighty-six, Malcolm found a playful and unpretentious way to write about her own life. Still Pictures: On photography and memory is a series of short chronologically arranged reflections centred on photographs, shot through with her unerring sense of the absurd ... she deftly traces the arc of her life, sometimes revealing, more often withholding, a selection of precious memories ... For those who loved Janet Malcolm on the page and in life, the fact that there will be no further pieces by her, no more emails, letters, phone calls, or conversations in cars and observations while jaywalking, is truly painful. But to end with the annals of horsing around seems faithful to the Chekhovian spirit that meant so much to her.
Many of these pieces were published in The New Yorker or The New York Review of Books before being compiled as a 'memoir,' but it’s hard not to wonder whether Malcolm herself, had she been alive, would have wanted to see them published as a book ... Almost all the pieces are three to eight pages in length; all are possessed of charm and delicacy; and in all of them the young Janet is the character upon whom rests the burden of insight and resolve, the one to whom life is happening. Yet in almost all instances, the piece will be long on description, short on analysis, and more than somewhat vague in intent. If ever a book wished to see the light of day at the same time that it didn’t, this is it ... The voice that is speaking to us in Still Pictures has not found that perfect place from which to address us. It comes from way too far away. It often can seem disengaged, even to the point of having no agency at all—and without agency, of course, one cannot put felt life on the page.
Engrossing ... Each story is intriguing, revealing the seen and unseen currents of those days ... The real power of Still Lives doesn’t issue only from the short narratives that, over the course of the book, become a type of autobiography. The real power here is the curiosity, the wisdom and insight Malcolm brings to the anecdotes and vignettes ... Malcolm is a brilliant explorer of the reasons behind what we see and do. Her focus in this book is her own past and, from the vantage point of age, she regards her own history as a prompt for deep curiosity. As she tries to explain herself, we follow along, insight to insight, question to question.
Many of these essays look slight, and yet the collection gains from its oddly off-centered quality—cantilevered, perhaps, as so many of her books are ... Still Pictures lives in memories that go nowhere, and most of them from before Malcolm was twenty, memories that in focusing on the forgotten people around her seem at first to tell us very little. They are, however, what made her; a self emerges from this elegant though fragmentary volume, a self that is at once recognizable and familiar even though the book includes only a few images of her adult life.
Malcolm disparages the concept of a linear autobiography... and instead provides only small glimpses into her life, turning, however briefly, her analytical gaze on herself. Admittedly, I wouldn’t recommend this one for new readers of Malcolm. In true journalistic fashion, Malcolm’s writing is more successful when she turns her literary and psychoanalytical eye on another subject. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she tends to be less critical of herself than she is of say, Anna Freud or Ted Hughes ... Nevertheless, diehard fans, myself included, will find it well worth the read.
She knows better than to expose herself the way her subjects do; there is no moment when her reticence falters, or she reveals more than she intends, uncovering some hidden, seamy motive behind her own self-talk ... Instead, this slight and sparing memoir is a testament to those attributes Malcolm most admired (and relied on her journalistic subjects to lack): dignity, discretion, craft, and control. In its guardedness, its respect for privacy, its disinterest in demythologizing, its tenderness and even credulity, Still Pictures makes explicit a muted moral provocation running through Malcolm’s books: that we are all essentially false Pharisees, serial violators of the Golden Rule, constantly claiming exemptions, forbearance, and reprieves for ourselves (and those whom we love) that we would never permit to others.
A strangely heartbreaking reminiscence of her young life that Malcolm had tucked neatly away somewhere awaiting excavation ... It is her vulnerability that dominates throughout these pages, and we get a peek at a Malcolm we haven’t seen before ... Malcolm’s strong suit isn’t confession or revelation or even seeking redemption. Her natural inclination is a suspiciousness of the past. She seems immune to regret except in the rarest of circumstances. It is impossible to read this work and not feel a little sorry for her. By so many accounts, her life was a masterwork of self-invention. But some readers may find themselves thinking there is much she missed out on. Such are the infinite mysteries of an individual human life.
This posthumous, delectably personal volume is a gift to all who have been happily provoked by her cutting observations, refusal to play nice, and mordant wit and a boon for every reader in search of superbly precise memoiristic essays ... Piquing.
A memoir as elusive as it is revealing ... What she does expose are sharp observations rendered in the precise, stylish prose that earned her acclaim ... A graceful meditation on memory.
