Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers by Janet Malcolm (2013) Hardcover

by JANET MALCOLM

Hardcover, ?

Call number

808.02 MAL

Collection

Publication

Granta

Description

A National Book Critics Circle Finalist for Criticism A deeply Malcolmian volume on painters, photographers, writers, and critics. Janet Malcolm'sIn the Freud ArchivesandThe Journalist and the Murderer, as well as her books about Sylvia Plath and Gertrude Stein, are canonical in the realm of nonfiction--as is the title essay of this collection, with its forty-one "false starts," or serial attempts to capture the essence of the painter David Salle, which becomes a dazzling portrait of an artist. Malcolm is "among the most intellectually provocative of authors," writes David Lehman inThe Boston Globe, "able to turn epiphanies of perception into explosions of insight." Here, inForty-one False Starts, Malcolm brings together essays published over the course of several decades (largely inThe New YorkerandThe New YorkReview of Books) that reflect her preoccupation with artists and their work. Her subjects are painters, photographers, writers, and critics. She explores Bloomsbury's obsessive desire to create things visualandliterary; the "passionate collaborations" behind Edward Weston's nudes; and the character of the German art photographer Thomas Struth, who is "haunted by the Nazi past," yet whose photographs have "a lightness of spirit." In "The Woman Who Hated Women," Malcolm delves beneath the "onyx surface" of Edith Wharton's fiction, while in "Advanced Placement" she relishes the black comedy of the Gossip Girl novels of Cecily von Zeigesar. In "Salinger's Cigarettes," Malcolm writes that "the pettiness, vulgarity, banality, and vanity that few of us are free of, and thus can tolerate in others, are like ragweed for Salinger's helplessly uncontaminated heroes and heroines." "Over and over," as Ian Frazier writes in his introduction, "she has demonstrated that nonfiction--a book of reporting, an article in a magazine, something we see every day--can rise to the highest level of literature." One ofPublishers Weekly's Best Nonfiction Books of 2013… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member soylentgreen23
A collection of essays about artists and their work; this doesn't sound like much, but Malcolm could write about painting the wall of your bedroom and make it seem transcendental.
LibraryThing member gendeg
Some say the best-written reviews and critiques reveal something about the critic as much as the subject being reviewed. With that criteria, you would think Forty-one False Starts by Janet Malcolm would be brilliant, the writing being so self-absorbed.

To be fair, the title essay was fascinating and
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engaging, a critique of the larger-than-life artist David Salle told in 41 short sections that give us different facets and points of view on Salle; its unique form is a commentary on the writing/creative process itself. But all the other essays in the collection didn't really keep my attention. It could be my limited knowledge of the contemporary art world, which is Malcolm's area, and is a world itself that is self-absorbed and insular. Sorry, this book wasn't for me, though I may not have been registering the writerly brilliance in its full form due to my lukewarm interest in the subject matter.
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LibraryThing member Smokler
Could have used another edit as there's at least three essays here that are giants (60 pages or more) that throw the collection out of balance (most of the other pieces are around 12-15 pages). But Janet Malcolms eye and prose-- piercing, probing, curious, and singular-- makes just about anything
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she writes beautiful. And a little scary.
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LibraryThing member fmclellan
Janet Malcolm is a genius. Her gifts are on full, and often chilling, display here. Full of erudition, razor-sharp judgments, icy observations. Learned and scary and admirable. Would not want to be on her bad side. Agree with other readers that the last two "chapters" are disastrous additions--are
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there any editors left? The chapter on Bloomsbury perhaps the best. I have read this collection over a day or so and feel as if run over by a truck--in a good way.
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