“
My living room has an oak-wood floor, Persian carpets, floor-to-ceiling bookcases, a large ficus and large fern, a fireplace with a group of photographs and drawings over it, a glass-top coffee table with a bowl of dried pomegranates on it, and sofas and chairs covered in off-white linen. If I were a journalist walking into the room, I would immediately start composing a satiric portrait of the New York writer’s apartment with its standard tasteful objects (cat included) and general air of unrelenting Culture.

- Janet Malcolm interviewed in The Paris Review

It’s only because I respect the guy who recommended this interview that I kept reading after that last sentence with its “I would immediately start composing a satiric portrait …” claptrap. I never say “claptrap.” But I want to swear. A lot. Enough to make everyone uncomfortable. So I’m going with “claptrap.”

There’s a story I’ve told myself about why I get mad when journalists act as caricaturists, foregoing the joy in the unexpected that makes reporting so fun to do and gobbling up details that confirm lazy preconceived ideas. The story I’ve told myself is simple: I tried so damn hard not to caricature the people I wrote about, and I was right to try so hard, and every reporter should try as hard as I did to do subjects the miniscule favor of paying close enough attention to discover who they actually are. Preachy, I realize.

I only mention the simple story I’ve told myself because I got email today that made me question the story. The email was about the first journalist I ever saw on the job. I must have been 12 or 13 when a newspaper reporter came to our house to interview my mom about efforts to end Prohibition in our Illinois town — in the mid-1980s, which is another story.

I remember meeting the reporter on our driveway. He glanced into our garage, saw a newish Saab and a 10-year-old Volvo, and declared, “Ah! Physicist cars!”

Now my dad is a physicist, and maybe Saabs and Volvos somehow constitute “physicist cars.” But I remember feeling instantly sick, suddenly sure — at 12 or 13 or whatever age of just wanting to fit in that I was way back then — that this reporter only wanted to see details that would show my family’s otherness.

I don’t even know if “physicist cars” made it into the newspaper, so it’s astonishing to realize how much the experience marked me.

Getting back to where this started with the Janet Malcolm interview, I’m glad I didn’t stop reading it. I especially like what Malcolm had to say about her husband’s editing:

He hated it when people went on and on. Much of his work as an editor was devoted to the elimination of superfluous words—often of superfluous paragraphs—sometimes even of superfluous pages . . .

Manuscripts have been preserved with Gardner’s markings on them, and on first sight it looks as if someone had taken an axe to a helpless piece of writing. But on closer scrutiny, you see the tact with which each intervention was made. Gardner always said that an editor’s first obligation was to the reader, but he had a remarkable feeling for every writer’s form of expression, so that his changes on behalf of the reader always read as if the writer rather than some crass interloper were making them.

After quoting this, I went back, cut a couple hundred words, and decided against starting off on a harsh, tedious tangent about the more recent conduct of the “Physicist cars!” reporter.