SOURCE: Oates, Joyce Carol. “The Case of the Canned Lawyer.” New York Review of Books 46, no. 6 (8 April 1999): 14-17.

In the following review, Oates asserts that The Crime of Sheila McGough is not one of Malcolm's stronger works. Oates feels journalistic strengths are evident in the book, but with McGough as subject matter, the story becomes bland and weighed down.

“Writing cannot be done in a state of desirelessness.”

—Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman

“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.”

—Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer

Just as The Journalist and the Murderer (1990) was a provocative, and provoking, meditation upon the ambiguous ethical role of the journalist vis-à-vis his subject, and The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1995) was an equally original meditation upon the complicated...