Culture

In Praise of Janet Malcolm's Prickly Career

Forty-one False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers BY Janet Malcolm. edited by Ian Frazier. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Hardcover, 320 pages. $27.
The cover of Forty-one False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers

Pity the poor soul who one day decides to write a biography of Janet Malcolm. She has little patience for “the arrogant desire to impose a narrative on the stray bits and pieces of a life that wash up on the shores of biographical research.” But oh, what tantalizing bits are on offer!