Malcolm, the author and longtime staff writer for The New Yorker who died on Wednesday at 86, was preoccupied with doubleness, with divided selves that tried to keep one half hidden.
There are the convicted killers in books like “The Journalist and the Murderer” and “Iphigenia in Forest Hills,” but what seemed to animate Malcolm most were the more ordinary manifestations of double lives — pretenses to selflessness that mask a deep selfishness; pretenses to certainty that mask an irreducible doubt.
But it did fuel a curiosity for what she called “the small, unregarded motions of life.” Malcolm liked to include long quotations from her subjects, allowing them to reveal , Masson recalled a conversation with Sigmund Freud’s daughter Anna, in which she said her father wouldn’t have wanted to be an analyst if he were alive today.
As the daughter of a psychiatrist herself, Malcolm was ever alert to inconsistencies and reversals, to text and to subtext, to the ways that we try to make ourselves intelligible to ourselves and to others.
Malcolm recognized something tragic in this, but she also found it interesting — a word she occasionally used, but not in the way that too many writers use it, as filler or a crutch.
There was something funny in this, and Malcolm, who had written for her college’s humor magazine, didn’t limit her criticism to high art.
Malcolm was lauded for her writerly precision and control, but what truly set her apart was how she used those qualities not to elide but to accentuate complexity and ambivalence; she made you think you were reading one thing before sending you through a trapdoor.
She may have been pessimistic about people ever fully knowing one another, but in another one of her swerves, she also suggested that it was through other people that we might begin to understand something about ourselves.