Zoë Heller reviews Janet Malcolm’s new book, Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers, for the New York Review of Books:
Comments closedMess has always inspired fervent emotions in Janet Malcolm. It agitates her. It depresses her. She considers it her enemy. The job of a writer, she likes to remind us, is to vanquish mess—to wade onto the seething porch of actuality, pick out a few elements with which to make a story, and consign the rest to the garbage dump. Images of clutter and panic-inducing domestic chaos crop up frequently in her work, not just as metaphors for the failure or absence of art, but as advertisements for her own narrative discipline. This is what real life looks like, they tell us. This is the tedium and confusion that Malcolm’s elegant rendering of things has spared you.
But if literal messes appall Malcolm, they also fascinate and attract her… Malcolm has a secret, writerly sympathy for the hoarder. She understands the mad desire to hold on to every piece of accumulated material, the fear of throwing out something precious. Art, she is fretfully aware, can be too ruthless in its cleaning operations… There is something awe-inspiring and at the same time a little barren about an environment from which all trace of “disorderly actuality” has been removed.