Essays offer vivid portrait of Malcolm
When Janet Malcolm died in 2021, her New Yorker colleague Ian Frazier wrote a eulogy for the magazine, noting that the famed and feared journalist had been working on a series of essays based on old family photographs. “When the pieces come out as a book, we’ll look at them and look at them again and never figure out how such wonders were wrought.” That moment has arrived, and Frazier was right. They are rather wondrous, revealing fascinating and confounding glimpses of an extraordinary life.
Malcolm, who was born in Prague in 1934 and fled to the U.S. with her parents and sister to escape the Nazis, was best known for her book-length essays on journalism (“The Journalist and the Murderer”), psychoanalysis (“In the Freud Archives”) and the law (“Iphigenia in Forest Hills”). But she started her decadeslong career at the New Yorker writing about interior decoration, design and photography.
Naturally, Malcolm doesn’t take the family photos in “Still Pictures” at face value, just as she never took the supposed objectivity of reporters for granted. “The reportorial eye — and I — are never far from her mind,” her daughter, Anne, writes in an afterword. Both are “transformative” acts. “Even as she tells us a story, she reminds us of her own presence, as the lens through which that naively imagined ‘actuality’ is being filtered.”
Each image sparks “plotless memories,” Janet Malcolm writes, and she refuses to provide them with one. That’s because “memories with a plot” — that is, the ones about conflict, resentment, blame and self-justification —commit “the original sin of autobiography.” And she won’t go there.
As a result, some of the sketches feel frustratingly inconclusive. Nevertheless, simply by trying to describe the photos accurately and capture the complicated cloud of feelings they evoke, Malcolm offers up a vivid portrait of Malcolm, almost in spite of herself. — Ann Levin, Associated Press
In these times, when people disagree about
seemingly everything, just about everyone interviewed for Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau’s “Rikers: An Oral History” concurs on the book’s thesis: The New York City jails on Rikers Island stand as a failure in every way.
For inmates, a stay at Rikers can be harrowing. Inmate-on-inmate attacks are common — a “buck fifty” in Rikers parlance is a razor slash that requires 150 stitches to close. How do blades get in? The same way drugs, phones and weapons infiltrate — visitors, incoming inmates and friendly guards. Gangs often emerge as the governance inside. Rats, mice and roaches infest the place. The smells of vomit, body odor, urine and feces are pervasive. Medical care is uneven at best. The mentally ill — estimated to be 40% of the jail population — suffer the most, preyed on by stronger inmates and often relegated to solitary confinement.
This book presents the experiences of inmates, staff, lawyers and groups who work with those incarcerated at Rikers. Some held there plead guilty, even if they are innocent, just to get out of the nightmare, said Soffiyah Elijah, executive director of the Alliance of Families for Justice.
Staff, including wardens, offer some of the most compelling critiques. The sheer number of voices in the book sometimes become repetitive and the speakers sometimes are incoherent. Nonetheless, the assembly of testimony presents a powerful portrait of a failed institution. The city had said it plans to close the facility by 2027.
Perhaps the most telling conclusion comes early on in the book: No one comes out of Rikers better than they entered.
“You internalize the dehumanization (and) that’s how you treat other people,” said Eddie Rosario, who spent part of 1990 at Rikers. “You’re never the same person again.”