If you are so easily destabilized, even with ample warning, she seemed to be chiding us, how can you trust any of your instincts? Even the most nuanced journalists, who acknowledge many possible versions of the truth, ultimately seek to clarify and explain.
On the one hand, Malcolm carefully undermines the entire project of literary biography, cataloging all the ways in which a biographer cannot support the statements she makes.
McGinniss had agreed to embed with MacDonald’s defense team to write a book and to share the profits with his subject, but in the course of the trial he concluded that MacDonald was guilty, as did a jury.
The heart of reportorial treachery, she writes, is the need to make real people into characters on a page, and McGinniss’s bind was that he had to turn the otherwise dull MacDonald into a literary figure.
Malcolm’s enduring interests included journalism, the justice system, Freudian analysis, and photography: all disciplines that lay a claim on producing a single, clear answer while in fact usually obfuscating as much as they clarify.
Journalistic subjects know all too well what awaits them when the days of wine and roses—the days of the interview—are over.
Few journalists, and fewer subjects and readers, now question the exploitative nature of journalism, as she humblebragged in 2011: “Today, my critique seems obvious, even banal.” Malcolm’s best work can induce days-long intellectual vertigo—a far different effect than the tinny hangover one gets from reading brilliant but adolescent polemicists in the Christopher Hitchens mold.
Her critique of Joe McGinniss was, in the end, unpersuasive: His fault was not that he had to warp MacDonald to write about him, but that he lied.
Malcolm might have taken issue with each of these complaints, and I would have flinched before the task of debating her directly; she coolly demolished better minds than mine.