The recent photographs that accompanied Sontag’s obituaries in the world press may have given her the last opportunity to shock her audience. In 1992, when, a few months before her 60th birthday, she posed for a portrait on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, she was still beautiful. By the time she died, the beauty had gone. But you can’t say she lost her looks. She looked great. She’d always been exasperated with the level of scrutiny devoted to her appearance, and it was gratifying to watch the way she carried herself after her gorgeousness deserted her. She seemed pleased. Accepting phone-in questions on a long, incisive “Bookspan: In Depth” interview (“Sometimes I think we only have one party, the Republican Party, and it has a branch called the Democratic Party”) in March 2003, she projected something very different from the old hauteur. Her strong jaw had taken over her face, and the icy fineness had given way to power and warmth. Sontag was never lacking in self-regard; she was hardly unaware of the figure she cut; but her lack of personal vanity was startling — as startling as her beauty.

At least, that’s how it looked from a distance, to me. I never met Sontag. My relation to her was entirely one of reader to writer, and in “Sontag & Kael” I proffered some judgments I know she could never have forgiven me for. No writer is that lacking in vanity — and when it came to her writing, Sontag was as preening as any other master. Above all she would have been angry at me for preferring, as almost everybody does, her criticism to her fiction. But then Sontag was no stranger to quixotry. Her impossibly high standards were a golden form of quixotry, and in her lexicon “quixotry” was an accolade. Moralism wouldn’t amount to much without determination against terrible odds; not that long ago, Václav Havel and Nelson Mandela, to cite the most obvious examples, would have been called quixotic.

But if I wrote things she would have disliked (I tell myself), nobody would have been more disgusted by hollow praise. Not only wasn’t praise something she sought, but she seemed to go out of her way to attract its opposite. Much about Sontag — as her many obituaries have pointed out — was maddening. There was a lot of belligerence you had to cut through and shooting-from-the-hip you had to clear away in order to get to the greatness. One of her acolytes spent a good hour on the phone insisting to me that the only valuable form of criticism is the form Sontag practiced: praise. Her portrait essays are small festivals of praise. Though I love those essays, I don’t agree. The only valuable form of criticism is the truth. Between truth and justice “one hopes not to have to choose,” Sontag wrote. “But when a choice is necessary — as, alas, it sometimes is — it seems to me that an intellectual ought to decide for the truth.” That’s why taking her to task was, if this doesn’t sound too self-serving, a necessary component of honoring her. She never claimed she never erred; in fact, she took pride in correcting her errors. But she was always an angry writer, and her anger angered her readers, roiling around in the mind until — magically — it settled into thought.

She was angry at the philistinism of the consumer culture into which she had the good and bad luck to be born, and what I feel most bereft over is the loss of that anger, since more than ever it seems like the only rational response to the society we live in. One reason, I believe, she so often limited her literary essays to praise was that once she started in the other direction she couldn’t stop. She didn’t handle her anger gracefully. That was why I never thought of her as a great political writer. The greatness was in her cool, hardheaded essays on aesthetic matters; as an aesthete defending the senses against the intellect, the new against the established, silence against noise, she was magnificently coldblooded. But she was hotblooded and hotheaded when she turned to politics. I still find myself backing off nervously from her vitriolic essays and speeches on the Vietnam War, even as I endorse the politics behind them. In those writings, frantic rage (“We are choking with shame and anger”) is motivated by a frantic need: to do something — namely, to stop the war. And for all the incendiary rhetoric, the spewing fury, the bitter eagerness to bite the hand of America, the urgency of the need to halt the war implied a hope — a shred of hope. Something could be done. The war could be stopped.

The political writing of her final years is different. I’m referring to her profoundly humane and reflective 2003 essay “Regarding the Pain of Others,” whose theme was atrocity pictures, and its magisterial pendant — written when she was already sick with the cancer that would, after 30 years, finally kill her — her 2004 essay “Regarding the Torture of Others,” on the Abu Ghraib photographs. The quality of the prose in those writings has changed because the quality of the anger has changed. But given the disheartening events that elicited that shift, not even Sontag — who could talk about cultural achievement with a Nietzschean absolutism that bordered on the callous — could have taken much consolation from her triumph. By 2004, the United States was a society very different from what it had been even during the ugliest years of the Vietnam era, and the rage smoldering beneath every sentence of that great, judgmental final essay was a different order of rage: a rage without hope. Speaking out, speaking angrily no longer had a goal so simple as stopping the war, because the war was, in the phrase she hammered at with disquieting control, an “endless war.” “The torture of prisoners is not an aberration.” “The photographs are us.”

Those are despairing words, and since November that despair has become widely shared. But despair isn’t really a Sontagian emotion. It’s worth noting that her repeated “endless war” carefully avoids the easy, even useful echo of Orwell’s “permanent war”; the conditions of “1984″ don’t exactly apply to the current situation. It’s worth further noting that this kind of care with words implies the opposite of despair. The very act of writing implies the opposite of despair.

Which is why I feel so bereft at the loss of Sontag’s anger. In this world, at this time, that anger is about the only thing we’ve got to fight them with.

Several years ago, at a period when Paterniti was at loose ends, he hooked up with Thomas Stolz Harvey, an octogenarian former pathologist whose single claim to fame was that he performed the autopsy on Einstein in 1955 and then, in an ethically dubious coda, made off with the physicist’s brain. Paterniti would drive down from Maine, where he was living with his girlfriend, to Harvey’s house near Princeton, and when one day Harvey mentioned that he had some business to attend to “out West,” the young journalist offered to drive him and the brain to California.

Hence this alluringly capacious book. In the course of documenting their travels the author gets to draw on information about Einstein’s life; scientific speculation on Einstein’s theories and on the nature of the human brain; an earlier film documentary about Einstein’s brain; Harvey’s (depressing) life story; Harvey’s prickly behavior toward Paterniti; and, above all, America — the America whose startling bigness and strangeness and multiplicity are familiar to anybody who has ever driven across the country.

The formula won Paterniti a National Magazine Award for feature writing when the article from which the book has been expanded appeared in Harper’s in 1997. So why did I feel increasingly irked as I read?

The first of many reasons is the manufactured nature of the project. At the beginning Paterniti is knocking around disconsolately as his girlfriend, another writer, plugs away industriously on a book; as soon as he learns about Harvey, you can hear the wheels turning. The problem is less the process — how else does a writer find a subject? — than the project itself, which, unless you really believe that Einstein’s pickled brain is exceptionally important either scientifically or culturally (and Paterniti can’t seem to talk himself into either notion), is, to put it politely, piffle, though it does offer the potential to be entertainingly bizarre, in a stoned kind of way.

So there is a lot of stoned humor and stoned reflection, as, for example, when the author contemplates the idea of the physicist’s resurrection:

What would it feel like to be born with an FBI file already open on you? Or to know you had once revolutionized the world with your work, but then never found true love? Might you try to trade one for the other? Or would you just sit around smoking pot all day, rebelling against yourself?

It doesn’t sound like Einstein is the one who has been toking.

Take Truman, Hitler, Hirohito, and Churchill, combine their heights, and you have an NBA player. And yet they destroyed much of Europe and Japan, and left millions dead.

Mm-hmmm.

Twenty miles down the road, the snow suddenly slows to mere ticks, and a white light begins to fill space in the sky, prying open the clouds. As it will happen in this single day, we will live through four seasons. Which can occur if one drives long enough with Einstein’s brain in the trunk. Time bends, accelerates, and overlaps; it moves backward, vertically, then loops; simultaneity rules.

That’s very nicely written, for crap. Intermingled with this kind of malarkey is the author’s grating Eastern amazement that life exists beyond New Jersey — he writes about the middle of the country in a tone of sustained amazement, constantly jumping between you and the page to shout, “Isn’t that weird!” Then there’s the ongoing discussion (all but standard in road-trip books these days) of his problems with his girlfriend (now his wife), which has about the same effect as a stranger’s pouring out his embarrassing life story to you at an airport: Why is he telling me this? you wonder. How can I get him to stop?

Throughout “Driving Mr. Albert” (I guess the title is a play on “Driving Miss Daisy,” which has next to nothing in common with this book), Paterniti’s instinctive skepticism remains at cross-purposes with his hucksterism. He enjoys portraying Einstein as a lovable old sausage-eating codger, and the biographical sections make it clear that he is genuinely taken with the physicist. But demystification is not what this endeavor is about. On the contrary, Paterniti has to pump the brain up into a magical object to justify writing a book about it, and that takes constant effort. Toward the end of the trip, after a long struggle, he manages to wrest the organ from the ornery old Harvey and hold it in his own grasp:

I am for a brief moment the man with the plan, the keeper of the cosmos. Do I feel the thing that relics, totems, and fetishes are supposed to make people feel? Something that I can believe in? A power larger than myself that I can submit to? Salvation? Have I touched eternity?

I can answer each of those questions for him with the same two-letter word.

None of this precision applies to his characters, who are as amorphous to themselves as they are to the reader. “Who am I?” they all seem to be asking, rather desperately. Charles Darling, a not exactly even-tempered plumber, and his more down-to-earth second wife, Joan (holdovers from Drury’s 1994 novel, “The End of Vandalism”), live a few miles outside the small Midwestern town of Boris with their 7-year-old son, Micah, and Lyris, the 16-year-old daughter Joan gave up for adoption at birth and who has been returned to her birth mother after her latest set of foster parents were arrested for making bombs. Drury plumbs these characters’ thoughts with a sophisticated naiveti that makes the grown-ups seem childlike and the kids oddly mature.

Over the course of four days, Friday to Monday, we follow their somewhat opaque doings, most of them insignificant, a few life changing; as in the real world, you don’t know which is which until afterward. Everything is almost funny and at the same time inexplicably sad. Violence hovers; guns play a big part in the plot. Charles isn’t above breaking and entering when it suits his purposes. Micah finds himself alone on the town streets late one night. Lyris, cornered by a guy she doesn’t trust, threatens to jump off a bridge. The suspense isn’t of the TV-show variety, but it doesn’t seem quite real, either — it’s something out of a parallel universe that operates according to its own generally benign laws (though with room for tragedy and loss), peopled by garden-variety fuckups who are easy to love because even at their sleaziest they have large reserves of generosity.

Drury’s tone hovers just this side of absurdism, flirting dangerously with silliness. I’d like to do him the justice of capturing him in his own words, but it takes several pages for him to get his weirdly beautiful colors vibrating. Still, I’ll give it a try:

They drank coffee in a restaurant with photographs bearing the splashy signatures of local celebrities. Dr. Palomino theorized about how hard it would be to wait tables. He said that removing the vermiform appendix was easier than taking a plate of soup to a table, because at least the customer in the appendectomy was out cold. Joan said she still had her appendix, and the doctor admitted that many people keep them for life. The main thing to remember when removing them was to count the sponges. Two men sitting in the adjacent booth moved to another booth.

If there’s an off note in Drury’s work, it’s the awkwardness with which he drags in literary quotations he likes, such as this one from Montaigne: “It is not possible for a man to rise above himself and his humanity … We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.” That’s an elegantly concise statement of the book’s major theme, but it comes from the lips of Charles’ mother, who is not a woman who could utter a sentence like that without embarrassment.

Similarly, the novel’s title is out of Tennyson, but Drury doesn’t give the reader enough context to make sense of it. He doesn’t even identify the poem, which is “Locksley Hall,” a semihysterical rant by the young poet about a woman who rejected him for a richer and (he thinks) far less interesting man. Maliciously, Tennyson pictures her trapped and listless while the clod she married sleeps off a drunk: “Like a dog, he hunts in dreams, and thou art staring at the wall.”

But the poem is a key to the novel only by contrast. Joan, too, may look like a sensitive woman chained to a coarse husband, but coarse is not how “Hunts in Dreams” leaves you thinking of the man who tells a girl still smarting from her mother’s long-ago abandonment, “It was not that she didn’t want you but that she didn’t know you.” Drury has said himself that the image of hunting in dreams means something to him that it didn’t to Tennyson — a striving toward something better. The notion has a dreamlike lyricism, and for all its comical love of the mundane, “Hunts in Dreams” is a dreamlike book — not in the way dreams are but in the way that life can be.

Yet I can’t deny that she brings some of it on herself, with the harshness — the mellifluous harshness — of her work. Malcolm is hard on her subjects. As she sees it, being hard on them is her job; “putting a person’s feelings above a text’s necessities” is, in her arid and damning formulation, a “journalistic solecism.” Like Sylvia Plath, whose not-niceness she has laid open with surgical skill, she discovered her vocation in not-niceness. Dryden famously noted the “vast difference betwixt the slovenly butchering of a man, and the fineness of a stroke that separates the head from the body, and leaves it standing in its place.” Malcolm’s blade gleams with a razor edge. Her critics tend to go after her with broken bottles.

Not that she relishes shredding her subjects in the service of truth. It troubles her — she has confessed to the “journalistic solecism” herself — and that discomfort is what led to “The Journalist and the Murderer,” the masterpiece in which she permanently tied the noose around her neck. This lucid and levelheaded essay, with its truculent opening allegation (doubtless headed for Bartlett’s) that “every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible,” is one of those remarkable works that trusts the reader to meet it with all the sly intelligence that has gone into its composition.

That’s what you get for trusting the reader.

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Malcolm was born in prewar Prague, one of two daughters (the other is the writer Marie Winn) of secular Jews; the family got out of Europe just in time, in 1939. Her father was, not surprisingly, a psychiatrist. She attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan (she is one of the last heirs of the Partisan Review seriousness of New York in the 1940s), then the University of Michigan; there she met her first husband, Donald Malcolm, a writer who contributed theater and book criticism to the New Yorker from the late ’50s until his early death in 1975, and from whom she eventually separated. In the 1960s she began writing for the magazine herself, mainly on interior decoration and design; in the mid-’70s she married her editor at the magazine, Gardner Botsford, a well-to-do member of the family that had funded Harold Ross’ original New Yorker.

By then she was writing about photography for the magazine, and she had found her mature voice, a strange and delicious combination of aesthetic passion, intellectual dispassion, cold candor and exuberant, extravagant metaphor. (“Innocently opening the book ‘Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait,’ by Alfred Stieglitz … is like taking a little drive in the country and suddenly coming upon Stonehenge.”) Malcolm’s often protracted flights of metaphor are always enchanting, and the element of fun they contribute to her somewhat dry and serious prose almost single-handedly raises it from the flatlands of knotty meditation to the high plains of literature.

In the light of her later work, her comments on two photographers are of special interest. She devotes two of the 12 articles collected in her first book, “Diana and Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography” (1980), to Richard Avedon’s startlingly frank portraits. “Avedon does not try to make people look bad,” she writes; “he simply doesn’t do anything to make them look good … Avedon’s pictures of men without props present an unpalatable truth. They show us that we are ugly creatures.” If that passage weren’t dated 1975 — several years before Malcolm began her own series of great, cruel portraits — she might have been writing about herself.

Stieglitz, the pioneering American photographer and gallery owner, also gets two essays; what excites her about him is his hardness. She savors a 1931 letter in which Stieglitz’s obdurate purism leads him to refuse a publisher permission to reprint his work: “In the reproduction, it would become extinct — dead. My interest is in the living.”

Malcolm loves purists. Her heroes, Freud not least among them, rigidly refuse compromise, sometimes badly to their own detriment. Her fascination with psychoanalysis centers on the weirdly immaculate analyst-patient relationship, with “its purposeful renunciation of the niceties and decencies of ordinary human intercourse, its awesome abnormality, contradictoriness, and strain.”

The hero of her 1981 “Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession,” Aaron Green, was such a purist regarding analytic neutrality that he still blamed himself for having apologized once when he showed up late for a session — “I put my own interests,” he fretted, “before those of the patient.” (After calling Green a “remarkable and lovable man” in her acknowledgements, Malcolm then painted him as so ambitious, narcissistic, gossipy and even venal that I’ve always wondered if he wanted to throttle her when he saw his portrait. Since “Aaron Green” was a pseudonym, I’ll never know.)

The book sounds the major themes of Malcolm’s work: the elusiveness of truth; the paucity of the means (therapeutic, journalistic, etc.) we pursue it with; and the unreliability of narrative — the stories we tell to pin it down, which are always incomplete and (consciously or otherwise) self-serving. From Green she also learned the surprising information that the analyst’s behavior doesn’t ultimately matter. “In the popular imagination,” he told her, “the analyst is an authoritarian, dominating figure who has rigid control over a malleable, vulnerable patient. [But] it is the patient who controls what is happening, and the analyst who is a puny, weak figure. Patients go where the hell they please.”

This is a key insight: that people rehash their stories with an Ancient Mariner obsessiveness no matter who is listening. There’s a wonderful episode in “The Journalist and the Murderer” in which Malcolm plays the boob to underline this point. She has visited a newspaper reporter named Bob Keeler, who covered the Jeffrey MacDonald murder case in which both she and their fellow journalist Joe McGinniss have taken an interest. As she leaves, Keeler offers her his blue interview notebook, which she accepts unenthusiastically, because (she confesses to us) she regards it as an

affront to my pride. An interview, after all, is only as good as the journalist who conducts it, and I felt — to put it bluntly — that Keeler, with his prepared questions and his newspaper-reporter’s directness, would not get from his subjects the kind of authentic responses that I try to elicit from mine with a more Japanese technique. When I finally read Keeler’s transcripts, however, I was in for a surprise and an illumination. MacDonald and McGinniss had said exactly the same things to the unsubtle Keeler that they had said to me. It hadn’t made the slightest difference that Keeler had read from a list of prepared questions and I had acted as if I were passing the time of day. From Keeler’s blue book I learned the same truth about subjects that the analyst learns about patients: they will tell their story to anyone who will listen to it, and the story will not be affected by the behavior or personality of the listener; just as (“good enough”) analysts are interchangeable, so are journalists. My McGinniss and Keeler’s McGinniss were the same person, and so were my MacDonald and Keeler’s MacDonald and McGinniss’s MacDonald. The subject, like the patient, dominates the relationship and calls the shots. The journalist cannot create his subjects any more than the analyst can create his patients.

This rich and characteristic observation also has to be read as a defensive one, because by the time Malcolm wrote these words she had been accused of exactly that — creating her subject — by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, the unfortunate former psychoanalyst she eviscerated in a pair of 1983 New Yorker articles that were published between hard covers the following year under the unassuming title (titles are not her strong point) “In the Freud Archives.”

Psychoanalysts rival early Christians in their mania for rifts, and while Malcolm may be a fundamentalist herself, she’s too adventurous a thinker not to admire a talented apostate and too inveterate a satirist not to savor the stuffiness of the mother church. Masson was a youngish analyst who had penetrated the sanctum sanctorum: With the blessings of Kurt Eissler, who was something like the pontiff of the Freudians, he had been placed in charge of the archives in the Freud house in London, where the great analyst’s daughter, Anna Freud, still lived. Access to Freud’s unpublished letters and papers, which Eissler and Anna Freud guarded with flaming swords, was a researcher’s notion of paradise.

Masson immediately started alienating Eissler and his colleagues by attacking their deity. A paper he delivered in New Haven in 1981 was the final straw. Early on Freud had attributed the sexual hysteria of a number of his patients to childhood sexual abuse; he later came to believe that this abuse had been imagined, and in abandoning the so-called seduction theory he opened the door to the theory of the Oedipus complex and to the whole new field of psychoanalysis. Masson accused the master of ignoring cases of actual abuse. Shortly after the New Haven talk, he was ousted from his post at the archives, and when Malcolm met him the following year, he was busily engaged in suing his former benefactors.

Masson spent hours and hours talking to Malcolm. She encouraged his trust, gossiping with him, cooking for him, even putting him and his girlfriend up with her in New York. And then, in writing about him, she unearthed a frightening talent. “In the Freud Archives” is a masterwork of character assassination, all the more devastating because Malcolm, in quoting her talkative subject at length, has him twist the knife himself. It’s all but impossible to read Masson’s long monologues (many of them, it came out in testimony, cobbled together from more than one interview) without thinking, “What an asshole!” When the articles appeared, their flabbergasted victim howled in shock at the betrayal, and his howl took the form of a libel suit.

The case hinged on five quotations that Masson claimed were fabrications and that Malcolm, embarrassingly, couldn’t produce on tape — although, as David Gates pointed out in Newsweek, “what Malcolm does have on tape — only a few lines are in dispute — is more than enough to make Masson look silly.” The suit threaded byzantinely up and down through the courts for years before a jury finally found against Masson in 1994. But for Malcolm the victory was a Pyrrhic one. The public spectacle had been huge and humiliating, her reporting widely criticized and mocked. The lawsuit gained her more notoriety than any of her books ever had; thenceforward everything she wrote would be a target.

But Masson had liberated her, too, by letting her discover the vein of gold in her natural malice. Her next major piece for the New Yorker, a 1986 profile of Ingrid Sischy — then the editor of Artforum, now the editor of Interview — is a textbook demonstration of the way a malicious reporter can pulp her subjects simply by describing their apartments. (Sischy is practically the only art-world figure who walks out of it unflattened.) In “The Window Washer,” a 1990 memoir of a return trip to her native Prague, Malcolm is brutal in her depiction of a professor and his wife who invite her into their home for not one but two meals. The transgression of hospitality — the slap in the face of her hosts — is so disturbing that it threatens to wreck what is overall a touching celebration of the newly liberated city.

Why is she so hard on these people? I think it has something to do with a blurring of the line between reportage and criticism. She nods approvingly, in a review of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” at Milan Kundera’s observation that “none among us is superhuman enough to escape kitsch completely. No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.” Yet she has remorseless radar for the kitsch in her subjects’ lives, and she uses it against them. I shudder sometimes at the awful fantasy of Malcolm visiting my house, which I love and have put a lot of thought into making my own, and telling the world, in a few dismissive phrases, what a shabby and affected place it is.

Is it surprising that a reporter so given to mutilating her subjects should focus eventually on the reporter’s relationship to her victim? “Almost from the start,” she recalls in “The Journalist and the Murderer,” “I was struck by the unhealthiness of the journalist-subject relationship, and every piece I wrote only deepened my consciousness of the canker that lies at the heart of the rose of journalism.” This chafing awareness was the sand in the oyster that grew into her finest book. Malcolm states her theme on the first page:

Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns — when the article or book appears — his hard lesson … He has to face the fact that the journalist — who seemed so friendly and sympathetic, so keen to understand him fully, so remarkably attuned to his vision of things — never had the slightest intention of collaborating with him on his story but always intended to write a story of his own.

The book’s taking-off point is the lawsuit that Jeffrey MacDonald, a doctor convicted of killing his pregnant wife and two young daughters, brought against Joe McGinniss, a well-known reporter and nonfiction author, over McGinniss’ 1983 bestseller, “Fatal Vision.” MacDonald had granted McGinniss full access during his 1979 murder trial (the reporter was even allowed in on the defense team’s strategy sessions) and continued talking and writing to him after his conviction, in the full confidence — understandable to anyone who reads McGinniss’ letters to him in prison — that the writer thought he was innocent. (“Total strangers can recognize within five minutes,” McGinniss wrote, “that you did not receive a fair trial.”) When the book finally appeared and MacDonald learned that McGinniss had portrayed him as a vicious psychopath, he let out a wounded howl, and his howl took the form of a suit against the journalist for fraud and breach of contract. The trial ended in a hung jury only, as Malcolm demonstrates, because one of the jurors — “a sort of emblematic figure of the perils of the jury system” — was a crank. The rest of them lined up against McGinniss, who then backed down and settled for $325,000.

“Reflections: The Journalist and the Murderer” appeared in two parts, in the March 13 and March 20, 1989, issues of the New Yorker, and its effect was electrifying. Reading Malcolm’s cool, considered, perfect prose, I knew I was in the presence of genius, and the weeklong wait for the second installment was a torment that only picking up the phone and calling friends who were going through the same thing could relieve. This was not, however, the reaction of Malcolm’s fellow journalists — to put it mildly.

The press response split between puzzled indignation and defensive fury. I’ll get to the fury in a minute. John Taylor encapsulated the indignation in a New York magazine broadside headlined “Holier Than Thou,” in which he objected that “the provocative article … was even more amazing for what it did not contain than for what it did. For while excoriating McGinniss, Malcolm fails to mention even in passing that she herself has been involved in a relationship with a subject that in a remarkable number of ways parallels the relationship between McGinniss and MacDonald.” He then enumerated all the outrages Malcolm had committed against Masson, mostly from the outraged Masson’s point of view.

I happened to be in a good position to know what was going on, because a decade earlier I had worked as a fact checker at the New Yorker (I had even checked some of Malcolm’s photography pieces, though I didn’t, and still don’t, know her socially), and I was well versed in the strange culture of the magazine. Under the editorship of William Shawn, it was a place of elaborate — some would say stultifying — delicacy and tact; hype and self-promotion were frowned on (which isn’t to say that nobody practiced them). By 1989 Shawn had been ejected, but Malcolm was very much a product of his era, and her writing adheres, at least formally, to his notions of reserve. “The Journalist and the Murderer” struck me as a brilliant solution to her obvious impulse toward autobiography: Talking about McGinniss and MacDonald was an oblique and tactful way of talking about Malcolm and Masson. Those in the know would get the message, and the larger, out-of-the-loop public, which didn’t care anyway, wouldn’t miss anything. I was bugged by the failure of Taylor and so many of his colleagues to appreciate her strategy.

Malcolm burst my bubble herself when “The Journalist and the Murderer” came out in book form the following year. In a newly appended afterword, she declared:

The notion that my account of this case is a thinly veiled account of my own experience of being sued by a subject not only is wrong but betrays a curious naoveti about the psychology of journalists. The dominant and most deep-dyed trait of the journalist is his timorousness. Where the novelist fearlessly plunges into the water of self-exposure, the journalist stands trembling on the shore in his beach robe. Not for him the strenuous athleticism — which is the novelist’s daily task — of laying out his deepest griefs and shames before the world. The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the griefs and shames of others. Precisely because MacDonald’s lawsuit had no elements in common with Masson’s did I feel emboldened to write about it (and, incidentally, was I, as a defendant, able to position myself so as to view a plaintiff’s case with sympathy).

A more stupefying specimen of bullshit would be hard to find — though there’s also something reassuring, even endearing, in this demonstration that Malcolm can be just as neurotic and self-deceiving as the rest of us. Her reasoning is bogus on every level. To write anything more than just the facts, ma’am, is to write about oneself. Criticism is widely understood to be a form of autobiography (your tastes define you), but so is Malcolm’s brand of reflective journalism (your perceptions define you). As much as Malcolm may think she hates the spotlight — she almost never gives interviews — on the page she is
helplessly forthcoming, a peculiarity that goes some way toward
explaining why the issue of privacy (“life’s most precious possession,” she
calls it in her recent New Yorker essay on Chekhov) runs through her work
like a nerve. And while I suppose it’s possible (weird, but possible) that Malcolm didn’t think about Masson’s lawsuit as she was writing about MacDonald’s, she of all people — a writer who enjoys roughly the same relationship with Freud that Jerry Lewis has with the Muscular Dystrophy Association — could be expected to know that what you think you’re thinking about is never the whole story. In the New York article, Taylor passed along a hypothesis, too neat by half but still hard to shrug off, that an acquaintance of McGinniss’ had put forward: “She could expiate guilt toward her Jeffrey M. by coming to the aid of another Jeffrey M., who was betrayed by a writer. Freud said nothing is coincidence.”

How could she be so clueless about her own method? In “The Journalist and the Murderer” she points to “the writer’s identification with and affection for the subject,” citing Joseph Mitchell’s Joe Gould and Truman Capote’s Perry Smith as examples of “the transformation from life to literature that the masters of the nonfiction genre achieve.” In the afterword she goes so far as to paraphrase Flaubert: “Masson, c’est moi.” Malcolm’s later books are works of profound identification with the luckless wretches, not the least of them Joe McGinniss, who are her subjects. Fear of self-exposure? With each of her books she stands more naked before the world.

I also mentioned another reaction of the press: defensive fury. It was a dumb fury based on a misunderstanding of Malcolm’s argument. Shortly after the articles appeared in the New Yorker, an editorial writer at the New York Times took umbrage at Malcolm’s “sweeping indictment of all journalists.” Fred Friendly, the renowned broadcaster, took up this theme the next year in his review of the book. Convinced that Malcolm was trying to put her finger on “what ails journalism,” he complained that her conclusion that “all journalists are guilty” was “distorted by a crabbed vision of the profession and her own place in it.” To counter what he perceived as the affront to his calling, he even listed several big-name reporters who he happened to know had excellent ethics. This defensiveness was part of a widespread misperception; a few years later, a Times reporter covering the libel trial noted that many writers and editors were reluctant to speak up for Malcolm because of the “sweeping indictment” (that formula again) she had leveled against them.

No, no, no, no, no. “The Journalist and the Murderer” is not an attack on the ethics of journalists. True, the worst-case scenario that Malcolm chose to illustrate her argument teetered on the dubious end of the ethical spectrum; its stark colors were what made her choose it. But her point is “the canker that lies at the heart of the rose,” the ethical paradox at the core of all journalism; it doesn’t matter whether the (“good enough”) reporter in question is McGinniss or Malcolm or one of Fred Friendly’s paragons of virtue. The journalist-subject relationship, like the analyst-patient relationship, is fraught with “abnormality, contradictoriness, and strain,” but — in a further paradox — these disquieting qualities are what give it its value. Just as therapeutic progress is predicated on the mutual miseries of the transference, “the tension between the subject’s blind self-absorption and the journalist’s skepticism” is what, in Malcolm’s view, “gives journalism its authenticity and vitality.” And she capped her argument with a zinger: “Journalists who swallow the subject’s account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists.”

Malcolm went on probing the sore that is the writer and subject’s relationship in her next book, “The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes” (1994), a dauntingly elegant reflection on the practice of biography. Plath has been both a gold mine and a minefield for biographers ever since she put her head in an oven and turned the gas on during the dreary London winter of 1963. A gold mine because of the trove of letters and journals she left behind, because of the drama of her shattered marriage to the equally gifted poet Ted Hughes and, not least, because of the stream of astonishing verse — among the finest of the century — that practically poured out of her in the year or so before she killed herself. (One of the pleasures of “The Silent Woman” is Malcolm’s shrewd and sturdy interpretations of these often difficult poems.) A minefield because Hughes, who remained alive until 1998, rose up in fury whenever feminist biographers who had found an icon in Plath tried to demonize him. For years he and his hawk of a sister, Olwyn, who controlled Plath’s literary estate and thus the rights to quote from her writings, made life as miserable for the dead poet’s biographers as the biographers made it for them.

Malcolm’s curiosity was piqued by the critical mauling of a Plath biography — one that, uncharacteristically, defended Hughes — by Anne Stevenson, a talented writer she had known, or at least known of, at the University of Michigan in the 1950s. Malcolm felt for Stevenson, she explains, “because of an experience of my own that paralleled hers. A short time earlier, I, too, had written an unpopular book, and I, too, had been attacked in the press.” (Melodramatic as it is of me, I can never read that melancholy description of “The Journalist and the Murderer” — “an unpopular book” — without thinking of the vicious critical attacks that laid Keats low.) And so, as in her previous book, Malcolm, champion though she is of journalistic cold-bloodedness, throws in her lot with those like her “on the helpless side of the journalist-subject equation.” She has “taken a side,” she asserts baldly — “that of the Hugheses and Anne Stevenson.” And from her own carefully palpated bias she extrapolates the canker at the heart of the biographical rose:

The pose of fair-mindedness, the charade of evenhandedness, the striking of an attitude of detachment can never be more than rhetorical ruses; if they were genuine, if the writer actually didn’t care one way or the other how things came out, he would not bestir himself to represent them.

There she goes again! Malcolm seems to be hard-wired to go out on limbs. It’s this audacity that makes her so provocative — and also, unfortunately, so vulnerable. That incendiary passage is the Plath book’s equivalent of the McGinniss book’s line in the sand about the immorality of journalism, and, predictably, it drew shrieks. Michiko Kakutani, writing in the Times, paraphrased it as “don’t bother me with evidence; my mind’s made up” and then went out of her way (even for her) to be insulting: “For Ms. Malcolm to suggest that her own shortcomings are in any way representative of the vocations of journalism or biography-writing in general seems not only solipsistic, but profoundly disingenuous.” James Atlas, the biographer of Delmore Schwartz and Saul Bellow, declared in the Times Magazine that in her “latest diatribe” Malcolm was arguing that “biography is a spurious art,” and paraphrasing her observation “The writer, like the murderer, needs a motive” as “The biographer’s real intent is to enact revenge,” he finished up on a note of injured high-mindedness: “To recover and bring forth, to preserve against oblivion the documents that give texture to a life, those ‘fossils of feeling’ that Janet Malcolm holds up as the one verifiable artifact of truth — is that such a scurrilous vocation?” (It is if you write like that.)

Malcolm, of course, wasn’t attacking the biographer’s art any more than she had earlier been attacking the journalist’s. What she was doing, in fact, was engaging in it. And despite the confession of tendentiousness that her critics accepted at face value, her book is no valentine to Ted and Olwyn Hughes or to Anne Stevenson, all three of whom hobble out of its pages more bruised than some of their detractors. (Malcolm’s idea of defense is rougher than many biographers’ prosecution.)

Meanwhile, in the course of “The Silent Woman” a more resonant theme emerges. Alluding to Jorge Luis Borges’ story “The Aleph,” in which the storyteller goes down into a cellar where he experiences a vision of everything in the world, Malcolm comments, “Writer’s block derives from the mad ambition to enter that cellar; the fluent writer is content to stay in the close attic of partial expression, to say what is ‘running through his mind,’ and to accept that it may not — cannot — be wholly true, to risk that it will be misunderstood.” The problem, she goes on, is narrative itself, for narrative, in being of necessity selective, is always incomplete and thus never wholly true.

This theme, the elusiveness of truth, underlies (as I said earlier) nearly all of Malcolm’s writing. The psychoanalytic books pose the narrativizing consciousness against the Aleph of the unconscious; “The Journalist and the Murderer” and “The Silent Woman” are about conflicting narratives. Having explored the therapeutic, journalistic and biographical avenues by which we try, however futilely, to make our muddled way to truth, in last year’s “The Crime of Sheila McGough” she takes up the even more inadequate legal one. At the very outset she observes that the struggle in a trial “is between two competing narratives,” and later she elaborates: “Trials are won by attorneys whose stories fit, and lost by those whose stories are like the shapeless housecoat that truth, in her disdain for appearances, has chosen as her uniform.” Truth is not only a harsh mistress but also a “messy, incoherent, aimless, boring, absurd” one. “The truth does not make a good story; that’s why we have art.”

Malcolm’s eponymous heroine is, in her dowdy and unappealing literal-mindedness, the embodiment of this housecoat-wearing truth. Sheila McGough, an attorney in the state of Virginia, served two and a half years in federal prison after being convicted in 1990 on 14 counts of felony stemming from her unusually dogged defense of a con artist named Bob Bailes. Malcolm believes ardently (her emotion in this book is striking) in her subject’s innocence even while conceding that, owing to the necessary simplifications a trial requires, no jury would or probably could have found for her.

But Sheila is a recalcitrant heroine. Unlike Jeffrey Masson, a fountain of eloquence before whom all a journalist needed to do was park herself and turn on the tape, Sheila spoke in the “guileless and incontinent” drone of the bore who has to recount every last detail of an excruciatingly tangled story:

I don’t know if I’ve ever had a more irritating subject. I know I have never before behaved so badly to a subject. I have never before interrupted, lost patience with, spoken so unpleasantly to a subject as I have to Sheila — to my shame and vexation afterward. I have never before dreaded calling a subject on the telephone as I have dreaded calling Sheila. To my simplest question she would give an answer of such relentless length and tediousness and uncomprehending irrelevance that I could almost have wept with impatience. I took notes of these phone calls, and among them I have found little cries of despair. One of them was: “Help, help! I’m trapped talking to Sheila. She won’t stop. Save me.”

Yet if Sheila is unbearable she is also, to use Malcolm’s word, exquisite. Elsewhere Malcolm has acknowledged (without irony) the importance of hypocrisy as “the grease that keeps society functioning in an agreeable way.” What she sees when she looks at her heroine is “the impossible purity of her position,” and it makes Sheila “rather magnificent.” At last — an honest woman! A lunatic, granted, but a truthful one.

And not only that. I don’t think there can be any doubt that Malcolm’s affection for Sheila owes a great deal to her identification with a fellow purist who bollixed her career while acting under the delusion that she was sticking to the straight and narrow. Of Sheila’s trial she writes, “It was like one of those nightmares of guilt, where everyone you have ever known has gathered to accuse you of wrongdoing.” Notice the universalizing second person; she might as well have used the first, having suffered this nightmare herself, not just in her humiliating trial but, more bewilderingly, in the press crusade against her that left her in the minds of many, as she wryly phrased it, “a kind of fallen woman of journalism.” This been-there empathy lies behind her bitter observation, in “Sheila McGough,” that

in a sense, everyone who is brought to trial, criminal or civil, is framed. For while the law speaks of a presumption of innocence, it knows full well that the accused is weighed down under a burden extremely difficult to get out from under. The deck is stacked against the accused. An accusation has enormous psychological clout. Once someone is accused of a crime or misdeed, he begins to burn with a kind of radioactivity. The story of wrongdoing that the prosecutor or the plaintiff’s lawyer tells the jury is a fleshing out of the jury’s preconception. The task of the defense is not to clear the accused (that is impossible; it is too late for that) but to attack the accusers — to show that the plaintiff or the government’s witnesses are even worse than the accused.

Judging from the outcome of the libel trial and from their later careers, it seems safe to say (but “safe” is dicey — you have to take account of my own bias, which should be clear by now) that the plaintiff in Masson v. Malcolm came out looking worse than the defendant.

Having earlier offended journalists and biographers, Malcolm now suffered the wrath of the judiciary. In a New Republic assault, federal judge Richard A. Posner rose to the defense of the American system of trial by jury, arguing that Malcolm aimed not only to exonerate Sheila but also to show that the system “cannot do justice in any case, owing to its epistemological and ethical inadequacies.” And going on to suggest that Malcolm had a few ethical inadequacies of her own, he accused her of deleting important facts from her report in order to stack the deck in Sheila’s favor.

Of course, Malcolm wasn’t any more attacking American jurisprudence than earlier she’d been attacking journalism and biography. “No one has ever thought of a better system,” she says (or sighs) explicitly — which doesn’t mean that she’s not fascinated by its paradoxes or blind to its weaknesses. Her failing here, in fact, is actually the opposite of the one Posner charges her with. “The Crime of Sheila McGough” falters, as her other books don’t, because all the ins and outs of the case against Sheila (and of the countless balled-up cases against her fatal client, Bailes) are so hard to follow and ultimately so boring that the narrative bogs down; by the end, I was as confused as most of the jurors. She relates too much, not too little.

But it’s an admirable failure. Anyone after a prize as slippery as truth is swimming against a challenging current. Toward the beginning of “In the Freud Archives,” Malcolm offers an arresting metaphor for psychoanalytic therapy: “To ‘make the unconscious conscious’ … is to pour water through a sieve. The moisture that remains on the surface of the mesh is the benefit of analysis.” That moisture is also about all of value that we can confidently retrieve from the current of factoids, rumors, misunderstandings and flat-out lies through which the truth (whatever that is) tumbles along like specks of silver. Or — to shift to her later, homelier and, I think, lovelier metaphor — Malcolm is “exquisite,” even “rather magnificent” in her efforts to tailor the shapeless housecoat of the truth into an honest and serviceable garment without dolling it up beyond recognition. And if it draws some outraged stares and more than a few catcalls, that’s probably the price you have to pay for going around garbed in anything so out of fashion.

But the reach of Shawn — who died in 1992 — is long, and Frazier’s new book, “On the Rez” (out this month from Farrar, Straus and Giroux), bears the stamp of the editor’s influence in its meandering, essayistic, more or less unclassifiable eccentricity. (“Everything has to have some kind of purpose now,” Frazier laments of the direction that magazine writing has taken. “And for a lot of great nonfiction, there’s just no way to say why this is interesting, why you care about this subject.”)

“On the Rez” is about American Indians — specifically about the Oglala Sioux on the Pine Ridge Reservation in southwestern South Dakota. The book is stuffed with fascinating material — about the casinos that have recently made several tribes rich; about Red Cloud, the rival of Crazy Horse, whom Frazier wrote about in his first full-length nonfiction book, “Great Plains” (1989); about Indians and alcohol, a subject that, as he explains below, he had a hard time figuring out how to approach (there is a lot of drinking in his earlier books, but by the time he started “On the Rez” he’d quit); about a heroic Oglala basketball star named SuAnne Big Crow, who died in a car crash shortly before her 18th birthday; and especially about his bumpy friendship with a mercurial Oglala named Le War Lance. The writing is (predictably) wonderful, but it may strike anyone who’s been bewitched by the daredevil virtuosity of Frazier’s earlier work as surprisingly straightforward and even subdued. The often somber subject matter, he explained to me, called for a simpler, less antic style.

As a “Talk of the Town” reporter in the ’70s, Frazier hung out with a talented group of young New Yorker writers that included Jamaica Kincaid, Mark Singer, George W.S. Trow and the late Veronica Geng (a close friend who died in 1997). In 1982 he left his lower Manhattan loft for an A-frame house outside Bigfork, Mont., and began the research for “Great Plains.” He moved back to New York for the writing of “Family” (1994), and then, in 1995, he moved his family back to Montana — this time to Missoula — to research “On the Rez.”

The drive from Missoula to Pine Ridge is 780 miles. As I was reading I lost track of how much ground Frazier covered in all his trips back and forth. (His books would be very different if he didn’t have a driver’s license.) This summer he and his family returned to the East Coast. I interviewed him at their house in New Jersey on a freezing night a couple of weeks ago.

Has Le War Lance seen the book?

I sent him a copy.

And have you spoken to him since then?

Oh yeah, we’ve talked several times. I think he read it, but I don’t know — he hasn’t said anything. The Atlantic sent him 10 copies of the issue with the excerpt from the book, and I said, “Well, what did you think?” He said two of them were stolen and the other ones he sold.

It’s a peculiarly structured book. Is the structure something you came to as you were writing it, or did you know before you sat down what shape it was going to have?

I knew where I wanted to start, and I knew where I wanted to end. I knew that the moment where SuAnne Big Crow is in the gym at Lead [S.D.] was emotionally powerful. And then, when she wins the championship — I knew that was a very powerful moment; it caused a big celebration on Pine Ridge and brought together all of the different factions who had fought during the Wounded Knee days in the ’70s. I knew that it made sense for the part about SuAnne to be toward the end. But other than that I didn’t have an awful lot of sense of structure.

All my nonfiction books kind of have an essay structure. You go from here to here to here more or less as your curiosity takes you, and you just have confidence that at each place you’re going to be somewhere. But an essay is best if it’s not outlineable.

This one, though, has the most cohesive subject.

Right. In “Family” I was running in every direction, trying to talk about all of these different things — the history of America, the history of Protestantism, what happened in my family and what happened with my father’s company. After “Family” I wanted to have something a little narrower. The tighter the focus, the easier it is to know what fits and what doesn’t.

In “On the Rez,” although you include a lot of direct exposition about Native American life and culture, the subject of alcoholism is something you keep circling around but never approach directly. Was that deliberate?

I couldn’t think of anything to say that wasn’t what other people said all the time. “Oh well, they’re just genetically — something or other.” “They have such and such that makes them this way.” I couldn’t find a sentence like that that I like. I’ve heard white people say, “Well, they have this problem,” which, even if it’s true, I wasn’t comfortable saying. So I didn’t go in that direction. I didn’t do any research on it, either.

There are all these explanations. The frontier was a culture of alcoholism — no question about it. White frontier people and Indians shared this bond. It’s like when you meet somebody you don’t know very well and you say, “Let’s have a drink.” Once you’ve had two or three drinks you’re the best buddies in the world. I think there was an awful lot of that — “Well, he might look different, but he gets just as drunk as I do.”

And I had another theory. Imagine you lived in a house and people moved in next door and they were the worst people you’d ever met in your life; your dog died and your plants died and your kids died … Wouldn’t you maybe just get really drunk and hope that they would go away?

I stopped drinking, and that is really important to me in the book. I don’t know if the reader will notice it, but it meant a lot to me to have this idea of why sobriety is important. In the book I say, “If the devil exists, he’s probably sober.” And I really believe that. That’s a huge change from the ’60s. In the ’60s, the devil was sober, so therefore — get drunk. Now I would say the devil’s sober, so you better watch it.

Your style has changed since “Great Plains.” In that book the virtuosity is on the surface; you’re really tap-dancing in front of people, having a great time and showing off. The virtuosity in this book is much more under the surface; it doesn’t call attention to itself. Was that a conscious shift?

Well, “Great Plains” was done for the New Yorker. It came after years of writing for the “Talk of the Town” department, where the point was to do something splashy and funny and to catch people’s attention — especially when you knew that the rest of the magazine was very likely to be much weightier. I knew that “Great Plains” wasn’t going to outweigh “The Fate of the Earth.” The point was to be kind of flashy — and also to catch Mr. Shawn’s attention.

Shawn thought that when I went out West I had gone nowhere. And I kept getting that from a lot of people: “What is out there?” “I looked out the airplane window and there’s nothing there.” I was trying to say, “Oh, yes, there’s definitely something here,” and so I was more stylistically extreme.

The subject matter of “On the Rez” called for me to be more subdued. I felt a bit more cowed by a subject as heavy as death and suffering — it just wasn’t the place for doing something flashy and surprising. And I didn’t find myself coming up with those stylistic ideas where you get the reader expecting something and then go completely in the other direction — like in my profile of Heloise ["Nobody Better, Better Than Nobody," 1983], where I say, “I had not been in Texas long before I started having millions of insights about the difference between Texas and the rest of America. I was going to write these insights down, but then I thought — nahhh.”

I had that feeling — that I knew people were expecting one thing and I would try to fake them out — up until the last few years. I guess without the New Yorker, I became much more conservative. Also, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to believe that you should be able to tell a story with the words that are at hand. And that’s how I do it.

When you were at the New Yorker, you were part of a group of promising young writers. Do you feel unmoored from that society now?

Well, just before you showed up, the fax machine was printing out a piece of Jamaica Kincaid’s. Back then if I had an idea I would walk across the hall and talk to her about it. Now, we talk on the phone, or we see each other; we are still really close. I don’t feel unmoored. I talk to Mark Singer pretty regularly. I miss Veronica Geng terribly.

I was infatuated: I loved the New Yorker. Shawn probably thought I was not a particularly loyal guy, because I moved to Montana and I got rid of my office while I was supposedly a staff writer, and I wouldn’t sign a contract, for reasons I don’t even remember. I found Shawn an oppressive figure and a great figure at the same time. If he was real close to you, you might get a little bit overwhelmed. Yet this guy was really a genius, and he created this work of art, and I wanted to participate in it without feeling like I’d fallen into some kind of Shawn rut. Anyway, it was a complicated relationship.

I think I would have continued there for my whole life if it had continued to be possible. When it fell apart, I was very angry. I was incredibly angry at Newhouse, and I still am. I got along OK with Bob Gottlieb — I like Bob. And then Tina Brown was a drastic shelving off into nightmare horror.

I would never write for it again. I don’t trust the people who own the magazine. I think they did badly by many people who worked for them. I saw what it did to people who were thought of as New Yorker writers and artists; it was impossible to scrape it off at the end.

My conclusion was that you will get your heart broken if you care about an institution. But if you’re loyal to people and you really feel affection for them, then you can follow them. I’m writing for some people who are now at their third magazine since I started working for them. I like staying with people, and that has proved to be a better principle than just loving the New Yorker.

But it was really something to lose. I was at the New Yorker for 21 years. And I hate when it comes up: Every so often there’s another book and you have to talk about it again.

I was going to ask.

It’s like a divorce — “Oh God, that’s what my ex-wife is doing now?” You’re always tied to it. At first I’m always resistant: I’m not going to talk about Renata Adler’s book ["Gone: The Last Days of the New Yorker"]. I’m not, I’m not. And the next thing I know I’m talking about it.

Have you read it?

No. But I’ve talked about it. I’ve probably talked more words about it than are in it.

Will you continue writing for the Atlantic now that William Whitworth has been replaced as editor by Michael Kelly?

I hope I will continue. Bill Whitworth has urged people to. He was a lot nicer than I would have been. I was also angry about that — but it’s possible that this will be a better change than the New Yorker change was. You’re always in a situation of hoping. We were hoping at the New Yorker for God knows how many years before we realized that Tina was not going to — that it wasn’t going to work.

Are you still planning a book about Russia?

Yes, that’s what I’m working on, a book about Siberia. I was in the city of Provideniya last summer, on the Chukchi Peninsula, which is just across from Nome, Alaska. It’s an incredibly cool place — my favorite place to go.

Do you love the cold?

I do, especially now that it’s so rare. I love to get up where you can still see winter. There’s so much in Siberia — obviously it’s a huge subject, but I’m always encouraged when I find a subject that has a great genre. And travels in Siberia is an enormous genre; it was very much so in the 19th century and also in the 20th.

Are you working on your Russian?

Yes, I am. It’s OK if they talk slowly. And I’m reading. The people in Siberia are incredibly literate people. In 1998 I did a translation of “It Happened Like This,” a book by Daniil Kharms, a wonderful, really funny Russian writer who was killed by Stalin in 1942. My favorite piece by him is “Anecdotes from the Life of Pushkin.” It’s just seven completely ridiculous anecdotes. The first Russian sentence I really learned is from one of them: “Pushkin loved to throw rocks”– “Pushkin liobil kidatsya kamnyami.”

When I was in Siberia we had guides — people who lived on the tundra — and we were doing something that involved throwing rocks into a burlap sack to make a big weight. As I was throwing the rocks in I said, “Pushkin liobil kidatsya kamnyami.”And everybody laughed. They got it — they knew the piece. And I thought, God, they know Daniil Kharms! A hundred miles west of Nome, Alaska, they know Kharms!