Janet Malcolm and Joshua Cohen

by Corey Robin on June 19, 2021

Janet Malcolm has died. I, along with three other writers, wrote something about her for The New Republic.

Like Orwell, who thought Homage to Catalonia would have been a good book had he not turned it into journalism, Malcolm described her writing as a failure of art. Only writers who invent, she said, can write autobiographies. Journalists like her could not. They lacked the ability to make themselves interesting. The light of their work was powered, almost entirely, by the self-invention of their subjects.

You can read the rest of it here.

On Tuesday, at 7:30 pm (EST), I’ll be interviewing Joshua Cohen about his amazing new novel, The Netanyahus. You can sign up for the online event here. I can’t say enough good things about the novel—it’s about Jews, Israel, the Diaspora, identity politics, campus politics, declining empires, tribalism, nose jobs, and more. And Cohen is just an extraordinarily fertile mind, a genuine novelist of ideas, who’s also very funny. Should be a fun event. I hope you’ll join us. Again, sign up here.

{ 2 comments }

1

roger gathmann 06.22.21 at 4:43 pm

So glad Crooked Timber had some notice about Janet Malcolm! A writer who – I think – deserves a symposium much more than some that have appeared on this site – hint, Freakonomics hint. The era of American creativity signaled by literary journalism and literature influenced by it – Renata Adler, Joan Didion, Janet Malcolm, Elizabeth Hardwick – is going out the door without a proper assessment, acknowledgement, etc. That this is a form driven by women might be the reason it is not more recognized. I don’t know. Anyway, I am sad that Malcolm is gone – she didn’t diminish as she grew older. God bless her.

2

J-D 06.24.21 at 11:58 am

I can’t say enough good things about the novel—it’s about Jews, Israel, the Diaspora, identity politics, campus politics, declining empires, tribalism, nose jobs, and more.

I hope I’m not being unreasonably picky, but that sentence strikes me as odd.

There are good novels about Jews and bad novels about Jews; there are good novels about Israel and bad novels about Israel; there are good novels about campus politics and bad novels about campus politics. If somebody was trying to make a list of things that could be said about a novel, I can imagine ‘it’s aboud identity politics’ or ‘it’s about tribalism’ being on the list; but if somebody was trying to make a list of good things that could be said about a novel, the kind of things I might expect to find on the list would be ‘it’s thrilling’ or ‘it’s original’ or ‘it’s funny’ or ‘it’s suspenseful’ or ‘it’s insightful’ or ‘it’s deep’ or ‘it’s incisive’ or ‘it’s tight’ or ‘it’s witty’–but not a list of subjects/topics touched on.

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