Malcolm implicates herself in that immorality, and the essays in “Nobody’s Looking at You” might be understood, in their sequencing, as an amplification of that earlier book’s famous opening and frank project. For after the fraught Fisher piece sets the bar low on visibility, Malcolm gives us a feast of looking in the next profile, “Performance Artist,” about the young piano virtuosa Yuja Wang. As famous for her fiery playing as for her risqué outfits, Wang saw her onstage clothing described by one music critic, Malcolm tells us, as “stripper-wear.” Here is how Malcolm puts Wang before us for the first time: “Her back was bare, thin straps crossing it. She looked like a dominatrix or a lion tamer’s assistant. She had come to tame the beast of a piece, this half-naked woman in sadistic high heels.” If the piece on Fisher, a clothing designer, was about how we mask ourselves in what we wear, the Wang piece is about how an artist discloses herself through her performances, figuratively and literally. Watching and listening to Wang, Malcolm wonders, “Is the seeing part a distraction (Glenn Gould thought it was) or is it — can it be — a heightening of the musical experience?”

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Seeing, listening: They’re the two major faculties upon which the journalist depends. Frequently Malcolm admits to her limitations. After Wang tells her about discovering Mozart, Malcolm confesses that she “didn’t and still don’t completely understand.” In a profile of the broadcaster Rachel Maddow, Maddow’s explanation of how she decides what the focus of a given show will be and how her meeting with her staff during the day tends to confuse more than clarify her intentions, Malcolm tells us: “I noticed none of this at the meeting I attended; I just found it hard to follow.” These admissions don’t feel like rhetorical moves, ethical appeals meant to earn the reader’s good will. Rather they feel like the substance of lived life, revealingly shared.

Malcolm’s presence in these pieces, you might at this point feel like reminding me, could be understood as nothing more than the habit of mind pioneered by the so-called New Journalists: Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson. And yet I am here to disagree. Taking no particular issue with the work of her colleagues, I wish nonetheless to say that Malcolm, line to line, is a more revealing writer, one whose presence in her pieces isn’t meant to advertise the self so much as complicate the subject. And also, line to line, she is a better writer.

Here, in the new book, is how Malcolm sees Dianne Feinstein: “A ’30s movie character in her own right, with her Mary Astor loveliness, and air of just having arrived with a lot of suitcases.” Here is how she describes a moment in the history of the Supreme Court: “The hearing for the nomination of Ruth Bader Ginsburg had the atmosphere of a garden party held to fete a beloved aunt about to embark on a wonderful journey.” Of “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” a reality show of yore: “Something always seems a little off in reality television. You don’t believe that what you are seeing happened in the way it is shown to have happened, any more than you think that the man in the Magritte was born with an apple attached to his face.” Each of these evocations is as much a portrait of the thing being said as of the person saying it, a person who, in addition to all her other virtues, is frequently very funny.

Then there is Malcolm’s reading of the face of John Roberts, in her timely essay “The Art of Testifying,” as he faced congressional questioning before his confirmation as chief justice of the United States: “Roberts had a wonderful way of listening to questions. His face was exquisitely responsive. The constant play of expression on his features put one in mind of 19th-century primers of acting in which emotions — pleasure, agreement, dismay, uncertainty, hope, fear — are illustrated on the face of a model. When it was his turn to speak, he did so with equal mesmerizing expressiveness. Whenever he said ‘With all due respect, Senator’ — the stock phrase signaling disagreement — he looked so genuinely respectful, almost regretful, that one could easily conclude that he was agreeing with his interlocutor rather than demurring.”

Such a description is — to use one of Malcolm’s characteristic superlatives — delicious. It is the micro version of the form of her essay on David Salle: an accumulation, through the presentation of differences, of a singular picture of ambiguity. The key, if there is a key, to finding the source of Malcolm’s dedication to this complexity arrives at the end of “Nobody’s Looking at You,” in its largest section, devoted to Malcolm’s superb literary criticism. In an essay on the magisterial control Tolstoy exerts over the world he invents, Malcolm writes: “As we read ‘Anna Karenina,’ we are under the same illusion of authorlessness we are under as we follow the stories that come to us at night and seem to derive from some ancient hidden reality rather than from our own, so to speak, pens.” What Malcolm seems to pine for — what all writers do and few manage to seize — is authority, the kind of understanding that only the creator, or a rare creator anyway, can claim for the stories we live. “If the world could write by itself,” Isaac Babel observed, “it would write like Tolstoy.” But because the world can’t, we are fortunate to have Malcolm’s kind of authority, one founded as much on her failures as on her successes at seeing.