The Journalist and the Bore

...Malcolm reports that the FBI has an agent whose "beat" is to patrol the Journal's classifieds...

...Her tone deafness to Middle-Americanism extends to her decision to do the book...

...Bailes inevitably falls afoul of the law...

...McGough claimed to have been "'framed.'" By her own description, Malcolm took the quotation marks to mean she had discovered a like-minded soul attuned to the slipperiness of narrative, a fellow lay postmodernist...

...Her earlier books, like In the Freud Archives, have had a certain grandeur that allies itself well with the sly clarity of her style...

...It consists of "people for whom the fantasy of getting something for nothing...

...I wasn't naked with him...

...Once she goes so far as to bail out a man she has been appointed to represent...

...Sheila McGough, by contrast, is both dull and hard to dislike...

...Or with watching the small, hurtful deceptions of a marriage explode into large irremediable acts coloring Ted Hughes' reputation as a poet as well as that of his wife, Sylvia Plath...

...But what...

...The author's real problem, rather, is writing about what is to her almost an alien culture...

...She is the sort of long-winded individual who, in telling a story—and this becomes a central fact for Malcolm—leaves in too many details to get her point across...

...Unable even to get interviews with major Washington firms upon graduation, she becomes a private court-appointed lawyer...

...If we are to believe Malcolm, this was simply another example of McGough's unprofessional habit of going out of her way for a client...

...The victim is Sheila McGough, a spinsterish lawyer who in her late 30s left a good officejob to go to George Mason University's newly opened law school...

...That tale of a hardscrabble life is punctuated by Stafford's allusions to her trips to the symphony and gourmandizing with husband A. J. Liebling...

...The phenomenon of the urbane New Yorker writer venturing into the heartland to produce a book had already reached a low point with Jean Stafford's 1966 A Mother in History, on Lee Harvey Oswald's mom and her reminiscences about her son...

...The root of McGough's troubles was a real con artist, one Bob Bailes...

...There is an unspoken "but" fairly screaming at the end of it, however...

...Malcolm, who accepts this tortured statement as a "no," rationalizes: "The answer was typical of her overtruthful, undercommunicative responses...

...Malcolm makes a titanic effort to top this...

...In the process of representing him, McGough allows him to direct some of his ill-gotten gains to the bank account she maintains as an attorney...

...Sheila's case could indeed illustrate this with special vividness—if her story is true...

...McGough, in classic terms, is a bore...

...Yet McGough, asked for a denial of any involvement, answers: "I didn't take my clothes off with Bobby...

...Bailes is "a kind of con man's con man," we are told, whose scheme is "a sort of Duchampian meditation on con art itself...

...In fact, the marks look far more like those of shopkeepers who proclaim not a sale, but a "sale," even though they do not mean to imply that sales as such are slippery, relative things...

...Most of the sort of brilliant conceits that mark Malcolm's best work crop up in her description of him: "Con men are not businessmen manques...

...They are not businessmen at all...

...She tries to dismiss the issue with abroad generalization: "Overtime, some trace of eros finds its way into most lawyer-client relationships (as it does into most teacher-student and therapist-patient and journalist-subject relationships...

...Bailes advertises in the classified section of the Wall Street Journal that he possesses several insurance companies chartered before the era of state regulation and grandfathered to allow their owners to do business in grand Robber Baron style...

...I happen to believe that Sheila's weak story is true and that [the government's] strong story is off the mark," Malcolm writes...

...One journalist of stature, the late Anthony Lukas, writing in Washington Monthly, drummed her out of what is, after all, not exactly a priesthood, accusing her of writing from "well outside the journalistic tradition...

...He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust or betraying them without remorse...

...The government saw it as evidence that the two were in cahoots...

...Ultimately, her innocence and isolation lead to her being found guilty of 14 felony counts in Federal court and serving two and a half years in prison...

...Fascinating, too, from a reader's perspective, is Malcolm's take on her own profession...

...But Bailes' scheme does not have Duchamp's dexterous sterility...

...The problem is, Malcolm never dispels the suspicion that the government's theory—of McGough falling in love with and abetting the con man—is correct...

...is so powerful that it frees them from the constraints of common sense...

...Her taste is that of a connoisseur, so while seduction or garden variety fraud might intrigue her, she prefers the sort of apostasy that somehow reflects the state of an entire profession, that can compromise careers...

...Reviewed by Richard Lamb As a writer, Janet Malcolm is chiefly interested in betrayal, and in the stories we tell ourselves and others to facilitate it...

...What Sheila's case illustrates with special vividness is something all attorneys know, which is that truth is a nuisance in trial work...

...Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he is doing is morally indefensible...

...Thus her fascination, in her books, with watching Jeffrey Masson flamboyantly fail the litmus test on Freud's seduction theory and wilt professionally (he had been set to take over the Freud Archives...

...We didn't have sexual intercourse...

...The truth is messy, incoherent, aimless, boring, absurd...

...They are called con artists precisely in recognition of the qualities they share with regular artists...

...Still, Malcolm's thesis that the legal system is really a kind of contest, in which the competing sides painstakingly shape narratives bearing little resemblance to the truth, with the sleekest and most convincing winning, is not far-fetched...

...Common sense is the enemy of art, as we all know...

...She goes on to say: "The clientele for con art has never been large...

...She never," he noted, "went through the apprenticeship—general assignments off a city desk—that has shaped the work habits of so many American reporters of my generation...

...Never having worked with another attorney, she also doesn't seem to know what the boundaries of a lawyer-client relationship should be...

...They are for sale...

...After having been accused of fabricating quotes (she was later found guilty), she began The Journalist and the Murderer...

...Nevertheless, Malcolm—pace Washington Monthly—is a consummate journalist...

...That sent up a hue and cry...

...And when she praises the McGough family's tuna casserole as "incomparable" the reader may suspect with some justice that Malcolm has had no equivalently mundane gustatory experience...

...Her trials inspire sympathy but not belief, making Malcolm seem not only WTong, but mean...

...Speaking of a steakhouse frequented by the McGough family, she writes: "But those for whom the first meal of the day is imaginatively fused with the idea of promise and hope and things before they were spoiled will understand the réclame of the Western Sizzlin' restaurant on Lee Highway outside Alexandria...

...For truth to prevail at trial, it must be laboriously transformed into a kind of travesty of itself...

...We never learn...

...It is romantic, harkening to a turn-of-the-century capitalist Eden, before Theodore Roosevelt's trust busting, orincome tax...

...Malcolm came to her topic, characteristically, through the kind of letter most journalists habitually ignore: a cri de coeur from the wrongly convicted...

...One of her talents is the ability to talk about complicated matters in a paradoxical tone at once multilayered and commonsensical...

...conceited, convincing men— lent themselves both to her particular interest and to her quiet parody...

...Their characters— braggarts...

...In this book, her seventh, Malcolm examines the legal system and its own special form of betrayal, miscarriage of justice...