JANET MALCOLM AND Joan Didion, both gone now. And both missed. Didion was more a culture hero than Malcolm was, perhaps. I suspect no book by Malcolm shows up on reading lists for courses in MFA programs as often as The White Album or Year of Magical Thinking does. And Malcolm's work is quite a bit less personal, which makes a difference. They were both journalists, though, at bottom, and both gifted ones.
They had that knack of getting people to trust them enough to start talking and keep talking...talking a little too much, even, revealing more than they ever planned to. Reading this book, I began to wonder, why did people continue to talk to Didion and Malcolm even though perusal of their books reveals that they are going to serve you up to their readers, done to a turn, slow roasted in your own juices?
Didion put it as plainly as possible, in italics, right at the end of the preface to Slouching towards Bethlehem: "That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out." So they weren't coy about it. People still talked to them...and talked and talked.
Case in point--this book, about people from the small, tightly-knit, somewhat closed-off community of Bokharan Jews in New York City. In the trial the book presents, Mazoltuv Borukhova is convicted of hiring a hit man to murder her ex-husband, Daniel Malakov. She pleads not guilty, but if a motive could be discerned, it might be her fears that her ex-husband was abusing their daughter, Michelle Malakova. Going to fatal lengths to address a wrong to her daughter makes Borukhova a kind of Clytemnestra--hence the book's title.
The trial does not Borukhova's way, but Malcolm, I would say, does. Malakov's relatives, then, get to be the slowly-roasted-in-their-own-juices ones. They seem wary of Malcolm, conscious of how she could make them look, but they just can't help themselves. And Malcolm serves them up to us.
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