Several pieces, however, particularly the short reviews, make for intimate but curiously unsatisfying reading. Revering Malcolm, as I do, I was at first confused. What has gone wrong? Even if her subjects bore you, she is never dull. As she wrote of Irving Penn, his portraits are Penns before they are photographs of his subjects. We read a piece by Malcolm for Malcolm — for the complicity she creates with the reader, the novelistic eye for gestures, the density of detail.

There is a clue to the source of this trouble in her profile of Wang, the celebrated pianist who has a taste for performing in skintight dresses and spiked heels. Malcolm quotes The Times’s critic Zachary Woolfe on how these outfits produce a dramatic contrast between the body and the instrument — “It turns a recital into a performance.”

Criticism itself is a performance of a kind; this is why I suspect Malcolm is moved, and not just impressed, by Wang. But too often in this book we watch a powerful critic taking on targets that feel unworthy — not because they are small but because she does not elevate them or make a sufficient case for their importance. She flatters them instead, bathes them in adjectives.

She is rapturous on a book about email etiquette and, somehow, even more effusive about Alexander McCall Smith’s series “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency”: “a literary confection of such gossamer deliciousness that one feels it can only be good for one. Fortunately, since texts aren’t cakes, there is no end to the pleasure that may be extracted from these six books.”

Then there is Rachel Maddow, the object of Malcolm’s most unabashed admiration. Maddow is “magnificent,” her powers of storytelling “inimitable.” Her cable news show is a “delicious experience,” “lucid and enthralling,” “TV entertainment at its finest.”

With all due respect to both Maddow and Malcolm, I started to feel a little insane.

Malcolm can praise well; she’s done so especially forcefully writing in favor of two books much maligned in their time: Norman Podhoretz’s memoir “Making It” and J.D. Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey.”

They are defenses, though, and that makes all the difference.

“Scratch a great photograph and find a painting (or painterly influence),” she once wrote. Scratch Malcolm’s nonfiction and find a 19th-century novel. Many of her best pieces hinge on bygone plot devices: a lost journal, a missing letter, a misheard word. She is the sleuth who divines the details, pieces the story together, restores order. But as her new book proves, there is no story — there is no hero — without, first, a worthy antagonist.