Is it surprising that a reporter so given to mutilating her subjects should focus eventually on the reporter's relationship to her victim? "Almost from the start," she recalls in "The Journalist and the Murderer," "I was struck by the unhealthiness of the journalist-subject relationship, and every piece I wrote only deepened my consciousness of the canker that lies at the heart of the rose of journalism." This chafing awareness was the sand in the oyster that grew into her finest book. Malcolm states her theme on the first page:

Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns -- when the article or book appears -- his hard lesson ... He has to face the fact that the journalist -- who seemed so friendly and sympathetic, so keen to understand him fully, so remarkably attuned to his vision of things -- never had the slightest intention of collaborating with him on his story but always intended to write a story of his own.

The book's taking-off point is the lawsuit that Jeffrey MacDonald, a doctor convicted of killing his pregnant wife and two young daughters, brought against Joe McGinniss, a well-known reporter and nonfiction author, over McGinniss' 1983 bestseller, "Fatal Vision." MacDonald had granted McGinniss full access during his 1979 murder trial (the reporter was even allowed in on the defense team's strategy sessions) and continued talking and writing to him after his conviction, in the full confidence -- understandable to anyone who reads McGinniss' letters to him in prison -- that the writer thought he was innocent. ("Total strangers can recognize within five minutes," McGinniss wrote, "that you did not receive a fair trial.") When the book finally appeared and MacDonald learned that McGinniss had portrayed him as a vicious psychopath, he let out a wounded howl, and his howl took the form of a suit against the journalist for fraud and breach of contract. The trial ended in a hung jury only, as Malcolm demonstrates, because one of the jurors -- "a sort of emblematic figure of the perils of the jury system" -- was a crank. The rest of them lined up against McGinniss, who then backed down and settled for $325,000.

"Reflections: The Journalist and the Murderer" appeared in two parts, in the March 13 and March 20, 1989, issues of the New Yorker, and its effect was electrifying. Reading Malcolm's cool, considered, perfect prose, I knew I was in the presence of genius, and the weeklong wait for the second installment was a torment that only picking up the phone and calling friends who were going through the same thing could relieve. This was not, however, the reaction of Malcolm's fellow journalists -- to put it mildly.

The press response split between puzzled indignation and defensive fury. I'll get to the fury in a minute. John Taylor encapsulated the indignation in a New York magazine broadside headlined "Holier Than Thou," in which he objected that "the provocative article ... was even more amazing for what it did not contain than for what it did. For while excoriating McGinniss, Malcolm fails to mention even in passing that she herself has been involved in a relationship with a subject that in a remarkable number of ways parallels the relationship between McGinniss and MacDonald." He then enumerated all the outrages Malcolm had committed against Masson, mostly from the outraged Masson's point of view.

I happened to be in a good position to know what was going on, because a decade earlier I had worked as a fact checker at the New Yorker (I had even checked some of Malcolm's photography pieces, though I didn't, and still don't, know her socially), and I was well versed in the strange culture of the magazine. Under the editorship of William Shawn, it was a place of elaborate -- some would say stultifying -- delicacy and tact; hype and self-promotion were frowned on (which isn't to say that nobody practiced them). By 1989 Shawn had been ejected, but Malcolm was very much a product of his era, and her writing adheres, at least formally, to his notions of reserve. "The Journalist and the Murderer" struck me as a brilliant solution to her obvious impulse toward autobiography: Talking about McGinniss and MacDonald was an oblique and tactful way of talking about Malcolm and Masson. Those in the know would get the message, and the larger, out-of-the-loop public, which didn't care anyway, wouldn't miss anything. I was bugged by the failure of Taylor and so many of his colleagues to appreciate her strategy.

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