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Opinion

The Art of the Interview

THERE’S a startling moment in Janet Malcolm’s new book, “Iphigenia in Forest Hills,” her account of the trial of a Russian-speaking émigré accused of murdering her husband. Having endured the paranoid harangue of a “law guardian” whom she suspects of being partial to the prosecution, Ms. Malcolm picks up the phone and calls the defense attorney: “Then I did something I have never done before as a journalist. I meddled with the story I was reporting. I entered it as a character who could affect its plot.”

Isn’t that what Ms. Malcolm always does? It’s true she’s taken things further this time, altering the narrative as she assembled it — a literary version of the Heisenberg Principle. But writing herself into the story is her trademark. For more than three decades, in numerous lauded — and at times excoriated — books, she stalked her prey (not too strong an image; of an interview with an academic, she writes, “my silver-plated scissors are ever at the ready to take snips at her”), appearing not just as a passive interlocutor, but as a character, the deliberately intrusive “I.” Interviews aren’t one-way, she’s argued. They are “transactions” between author and subject, “a special, artificial exercise of subtle influence and counterinfluence, with an implicit antagonistic tendency.”

Now Ms. Malcolm has herself been interviewed, and it’s instructive — even suspenseful — to review this “transaction” from the other side of the teller’s cage. Her singular innovation, after all, has been to devise a narrative strategy that encourages her subjects to reveal their characters in their own words. (Thus, in “The Journalist and the Murderer,” her famous book about Jeffrey MacDonald, a former Green Beret convicted of murdering his pregnant wife and two children, Ms. Malcolm suggests that the journalist Joe McGinniss, who had a contract to write a book about the case, pretended to believe in his subject’s innocence in order to get access.) Given her gift — her genius, really — for eliciting information, it’s remarkable that Ms. Malcolm allowed herself to be interviewed at all. She knows the drill: whatever you say can — and will — be used against you. Yet her motive isn’t malice (or not only malice); it’s to show us how journalism works.

The venue of her own putative self-unveiling is The Paris Review. The interviewer, Katie Roiphe, is herself a formidable figure who has never been shy about making her presence known in whatever story she’s writing.

Paris Review interviews don’t offer up many “gotcha” moments; the subjects are allowed — even encouraged — to revise their words. But, as Ms. Malcolm knows, you can’t be too careful when it comes to talking about yourself. Despite this virtual guarantee of authorial control, she set terms that had just two precedents in the magazine’s annals: the poet Philip Larkin insisted that his interview be conducted by mail and Vladimir Nabokov handed a pre-written text to his hapless interviewer in a hotel lobby. Ms. Malcolm stipulated that her interview be conducted via e-mail, the epistolary form of our day.

Their relationship was apparently congenial: Ms. Roiphe visited Ms. Malcolm’s “stately town-house apartment” on three occasions, but Ms. Malcolm was determined to hold her ground: no tape recorder allowed. “In most interviews, both subject and interviewer give more than is necessary,” Ms. Malcolm wrote in “The Silent Woman.” “They are always being seduced and distracted by the encounter’s outward resemblance to an ordinary friendly meeting.” Friendly this one would be, as Paris Review interviews always are. But there was no illusion of spontaneity. The subject was firmly in charge — “meddling,” to use her word.

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Credit...Tamara Shopsin and Jason Fulford

Their collaboration is an elegant pas de deux. “I’m so glad you’ve asked,” Ms. Malcolm exclaims in response to a question from Ms. Roiphe about the editing process. (Immediately one thinks, what if she hadn’t been glad? No doubt the question would have gone out the window.) “That is such an interesting observation ... ” “Perhaps we can cut through the haze together ...” “I think that passage is lovely and convincing.”

But when it comes to describing Ms. Malcolm’s apartment, Ms. Roiphe can put away her notebook. Strategically gracious, she encourages her subject to do the job herself. Ms. Malcolm responds with subtle irony: “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.” This is not an interview; it’s literature. In one paragraph, Ms. Malcolm has evoked a character (“the New York writer”); established a sardonic, self-aware voice (“air of unrelenting Culture”); and created a social milieu (the urban professional class, surrounded by “standard tasteful objects”).

“Many people have pointed out that Malcolm’s writing, which is often called journalism, is in fact some wholly original form of art,” Ms. Roiphe notes, “some singular admixture of reporting, biography, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, and the nineteenth-century novel — English and Russian both.”

It’s a form that has distinguished antecedents, notably the “dialogues” of Socrates (actually written by Plato); Eckermann’s “Conversations of Goethe”; and of course James Boswell’s “Life of Samuel Johnson,” perhaps the first — and most exemplary — instance of interview management. In the 18th and 19th centuries, there was nothing strange about such collusive intimacy.

I was curious about the effect of e-mail on the interview form. Would it mean the end of the personal encounter as a biographical and journalistic ploy? Would there be no more wandering around with one’s subject, gleaning what conversational tidbits one could? No more picking up the phone? (Ms. Malcolm’s telephonic intervention, it should be noted, has no effect on the criminal case she’s covering; the journalist is off the hook.) I e-mailed Ms. Roiphe to ask about her experience interviewing Ms. Malcolm: had it created distance between them? “I actually loved the e-mail form,” she wrote back. “It felt very old-fashioned and substantive to me. Like I was getting a letter by evening post. I suppose the disadvantage is that there could be a kind of formality to the e-mail, a thought throughness, in the worst sense, but with someone like Janet she is not going to say anything she didn’t think through under any circumstances.”

I wrote Ms. Malcolm for comment and she answered via e-mail: “dear james, i am in germany, writing on a german computer behind the reservation desk of a hotel in dresden. im so sorry, but i am not able to answer your questions now. i wish the timing was better. all my best janet.”

I was going to write her again but didn’t. Sitting in my office on a hot June day, gazing out the grimy chicken-wire window at a red-brick wall, I remembered an observation from “Iphigenia in Forest Hills”: “Journalists request interviews the way beggars ask for alms, reflexively and nervously.” You have the books, the interview, even a casual acquaintance with the subject, I reminded myself. Why not tell the story in your own way?

As if there’s any other.

James Atlas is the president of Atlas & Co., an independent publishing company, and author of a forthcoming book about biography, “The Shadow in the Garden: Writing Lives.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section SR, Page 7 of the New York edition with the headline: The Art of the Interview. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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