On being there: weekend book-review reviewing

Malcolm’s turf as a writer has long been that shifting, uncertain point where reporting, the law, literary analysis, and psychoanalysis meet, and it is always fascinating to watch her use the tools of one trade to peel back the proprieties of one of the others. In her book about Joe McGinniss’s research for his book about convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald, Malcolm famously remarked: “Every journalist knows that what he does is morally indefensible." She survived a years-long defamation suit brought by psychoanalyst Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, and then she dared to tangle with the many keepers of Sylvia Plath’s flame, among them the formidable Olwyn Hughes, sister of Plath's husband Ted Hughes, in itself a measure of sheer nerve. Malcolm has occasionally set my teeth on edge: she can be oddly block-headed about the most ordinary human failings, and yet she can enter into the minds of people on the edge with compelling accuracy, and sometimes, as with Allen Shawn, moving sympathy.

Shawn is an American composer, pianist, and professor. He is also a son of William Shawn, legendary editor of the New Yorker from 1952 to 1987. His older brother is Wallace Shawn, the tiny perfect playwright and actor I first fell in love with when some smarter friends dragged a reluctant moi off to see My Dinner with André, which left me walking several inches above the pavement for weeks afterwards.

From Malcolm’s review we learn that Shawn’s memoir is partly about his family, partly about his adult struggle with agoraphobia, with the mysteries of phobias and the severe mental distress he has witnessed in his family – his father’s phobias, his mother’s depression, and most affectingly of all, his twin sister’s autism.

There is no easy transcendence in a history like that, and yet Malcolm manages to weave Shawn’s simple, lucid testimony into her own canny analysis of a notably uncanny family to marvellous effect. From their quite different perspectives – Malcolm, the cool analyst, and Shawn, the bereaved innocent – both resist sentimentalizing the profound tragedy at the heart of his family’s story, the day that an eight-year-old lost his twin to an institution and was plunged into a mental war between feelings of relief and feelings of loss that has never ended.

We know from her earlier books that Malcolm will always home in on the cracks in anyone’s façade of niceness. In Allen Shawn, she has met an author who is ahead of her in admitting his own “dark” side, as she is clearly pleased to discover:

The "good" self set out to write a book about his phobias and phobia in general, but the "bad" self ensured that the book would defy the conventions of its genre and become a "better, darker" thing. As Allen Shawn circles his mysterious putative subject, he is drawn to the mysteries that everyone who thinks bumps up against. When he writes about the death anxiety he experienced as a child—lying terrified in the dark at the thought that "there was no help, that my parents could not help me, and that there was no escape from the fact of it, not even some special hint of a way out that might just apply to me"—he is hardly describing thinking exclusive to phobics. Many— perhaps most—normal children and adolescents are terrified, if not traumatized, by the idea of mortality. Shawn returns to the subject in a poetic passage that suddenly and for no apparent reason floats into a late chapter, and takes on the weight of a vatic message:

And here is Shawn himself, facing that mystery and finding words for it:

Life's unknowns are often knowable; many can be rehearsed or at least imagined. But death is surrounded by an infinite fog on an ocean without end. It is perhaps simplistic to say it, but one can understand death only in terms of its opposite, life. For me, it was always the not returning part of it that made me start up in the dark, suffocating. Yet after my father, who had never even ridden on an airplane, disappeared into that fog, it began to take on other meanings, and I began to dimly see that the not returning part of it is there with us all along, inside us, from the moment we appear into the bewildering new stimuli of the world, even from the moment we start to form out of the fertilized ovum. Now that my mother is gone, it is clearer still. There is only forward motion, and there always was only forward motion. There was never any turning back.

Many of us have struggled privately with the puzzles of our own minds or those of the people we love and sometimes fear for. Libraries of practical, useful books appear every season and the websites proliferate for those who go looking for help in understanding the enigma of the human brain and all the ills to which it may be heir or prey. I’m not discounting the practical, useful books, either: I have my own collection of them, and they help.

But every once in a while someone who has struggled with his or her own mind manages to break through to a special receptiveness, as Malcolm puts it, to the subjectivity of others, and she sees that achievement in Shawn’s telling of his family’s many stories as well as his confrontation with himself.

I’ve never read Allen Shawn before, although I’ve read and watched his brother Wallace, so I am entirely prepared to believe the concluding paragraph of Malcolm’s review:

The editor, the playwright, and the essayist are bound by a thread of—what? Is the word "innocence"? Allen uses it to describe his father's capacity for listening to writers, in opposition to the word "jaded." The writing of both Wallace and Allen Shawn has, as the conversation of William Shawn had, a rare quality of cleanness—as if it came from a spring rather than from the stale pool of received ideas that most talk and writing comes from. Such purity would be chastening were it not accompanied by a playfulness that takes away the sting and puts in a kind of good word for us all.

The practical, useful books come and go – they will be overtaken eventually by even more practical, useful books, and that’s as it should be. But some testaments to the spirit will never be dated, and Shawn’s memoir sounds like one of those to me.

So. How's your book pile coming along?