Janet Malcolm’s subtle snark is more like the swipe of a cat’s claws than the barking dogs of contemporary media. Her essay collection, Nobody’s Looking at You, has no unifying theme beyond her unassuming-yet-willing-to-draw-blood sensibility. She punctures the pretense of the ostensibly non-hierarchical hierarchy of the Eileen Fisher clothing empire, examines the academic antics of UW-Milwaukee’s Jane Gallop and demolishes the translators who dumb-down Tolstoy for contemporary sensibilities. “(Would u really want that?)” she asks. Malcolm has little patience for journalists who transcribe reality without insight or biographers with “priggish” psychological theories focused on “squalid findings” on their subjects’ sex lives. Reading Malcolm is a pleasure for the quiet force of her intelligence.
