Meanwhile, in the course of "The Silent Woman" a more resonant theme emerges. Alluding to Jorge Luis Borges' story "The Aleph," in which the storyteller goes down into a cellar where he experiences a vision of everything in the world, Malcolm comments, "Writer's block derives from the mad ambition to enter that cellar; the fluent writer is content to stay in the close attic of partial expression, to say what is 'running through his mind,' and to accept that it may not -- cannot -- be wholly true, to risk that it will be misunderstood." The problem, she goes on, is narrative itself, for narrative, in being of necessity selective, is always incomplete and thus never wholly true.

This theme, the elusiveness of truth, underlies (as I said earlier) nearly all of Malcolm's writing. The psychoanalytic books pose the narrativizing consciousness against the Aleph of the unconscious; "The Journalist and the Murderer" and "The Silent Woman" are about conflicting narratives. Having explored the therapeutic, journalistic and biographical avenues by which we try, however futilely, to make our muddled way to truth, in last year's "The Crime of Sheila McGough" she takes up the even more inadequate legal one. At the very outset she observes that the struggle in a trial "is between two competing narratives," and later she elaborates: "Trials are won by attorneys whose stories fit, and lost by those whose stories are like the shapeless housecoat that truth, in her disdain for appearances, has chosen as her uniform." Truth is not only a harsh mistress but also a "messy, incoherent, aimless, boring, absurd" one. "The truth does not make a good story; that's why we have art."

Malcolm's eponymous heroine is, in her dowdy and unappealing literal-mindedness, the embodiment of this housecoat-wearing truth. Sheila McGough, an attorney in the state of Virginia, served two and a half years in federal prison after being convicted in 1990 on 14 counts of felony stemming from her unusually dogged defense of a con artist named Bob Bailes. Malcolm believes ardently (her emotion in this book is striking) in her subject's innocence even while conceding that, owing to the necessary simplifications a trial requires, no jury would or probably could have found for her.

But Sheila is a recalcitrant heroine. Unlike Jeffrey Masson, a fountain of eloquence before whom all a journalist needed to do was park herself and turn on the tape, Sheila spoke in the "guileless and incontinent" drone of the bore who has to recount every last detail of an excruciatingly tangled story:

I don't know if I've ever had a more irritating subject. I know I have never before behaved so badly to a subject. I have never before interrupted, lost patience with, spoken so unpleasantly to a subject as I have to Sheila -- to my shame and vexation afterward. I have never before dreaded calling a subject on the telephone as I have dreaded calling Sheila. To my simplest question she would give an answer of such relentless length and tediousness and uncomprehending irrelevance that I could almost have wept with impatience. I took notes of these phone calls, and among them I have found little cries of despair. One of them was: "Help, help! I'm trapped talking to Sheila. She won't stop. Save me."

Yet if Sheila is unbearable she is also, to use Malcolm's word, exquisite. Elsewhere Malcolm has acknowledged (without irony) the importance of hypocrisy as "the grease that keeps society functioning in an agreeable way." What she sees when she looks at her heroine is "the impossible purity of her position," and it makes Sheila "rather magnificent." At last -- an honest woman! A lunatic, granted, but a truthful one.

And not only that. I don't think there can be any doubt that Malcolm's affection for Sheila owes a great deal to her identification with a fellow purist who bollixed her career while acting under the delusion that she was sticking to the straight and narrow. Of Sheila's trial she writes, "It was like one of those nightmares of guilt, where everyone you have ever known has gathered to accuse you of wrongdoing." Notice the universalizing second person; she might as well have used the first, having suffered this nightmare herself, not just in her humiliating trial but, more bewilderingly, in the press crusade against her that left her in the minds of many, as she wryly phrased it, "a kind of fallen woman of journalism." This been-there empathy lies behind her bitter observation, in "Sheila McGough," that

in a sense, everyone who is brought to trial, criminal or civil, is framed. For while the law speaks of a presumption of innocence, it knows full well that the accused is weighed down under a burden extremely difficult to get out from under. The deck is stacked against the accused. An accusation has enormous psychological clout. Once someone is accused of a crime or misdeed, he begins to burn with a kind of radioactivity. The story of wrongdoing that the prosecutor or the plaintiff's lawyer tells the jury is a fleshing out of the jury's preconception. The task of the defense is not to clear the accused (that is impossible; it is too late for that) but to attack the accusers -- to show that the plaintiff or the government's witnesses are even worse than the accused.

Judging from the outcome of the libel trial and from their later careers, it seems safe to say (but "safe" is dicey -- you have to take account of my own bias, which should be clear by now) that the plaintiff in Masson v. Malcolm came out looking worse than the defendant.

Having earlier offended journalists and biographers, Malcolm now suffered the wrath of the judiciary. In a New Republic assault, federal judge Richard A. Posner rose to the defense of the American system of trial by jury, arguing that Malcolm aimed not only to exonerate Sheila but also to show that the system "cannot do justice in any case, owing to its epistemological and ethical inadequacies." And going on to suggest that Malcolm had a few ethical inadequacies of her own, he accused her of deleting important facts from her report in order to stack the deck in Sheila's favor.

Of course, Malcolm wasn't any more attacking American jurisprudence than earlier she'd been attacking journalism and biography. "No one has ever thought of a better system," she says (or sighs) explicitly -- which doesn't mean that she's not fascinated by its paradoxes or blind to its weaknesses. Her failing here, in fact, is actually the opposite of the one Posner charges her with. "The Crime of Sheila McGough" falters, as her other books don't, because all the ins and outs of the case against Sheila (and of the countless balled-up cases against her fatal client, Bailes) are so hard to follow and ultimately so boring that the narrative bogs down; by the end, I was as confused as most of the jurors. She relates too much, not too little.

But it's an admirable failure. Anyone after a prize as slippery as truth is swimming against a challenging current. Toward the beginning of "In the Freud Archives," Malcolm offers an arresting metaphor for psychoanalytic therapy: "To 'make the unconscious conscious' ... is to pour water through a sieve. The moisture that remains on the surface of the mesh is the benefit of analysis." That moisture is also about all of value that we can confidently retrieve from the current of factoids, rumors, misunderstandings and flat-out lies through which the truth (whatever that is) tumbles along like specks of silver. Or -- to shift to her later, homelier and, I think, lovelier metaphor -- Malcolm is "exquisite," even "rather magnificent" in her efforts to tailor the shapeless housecoat of the truth into an honest and serviceable garment without dolling it up beyond recognition. And if it draws some outraged stares and more than a few catcalls, that's probably the price you have to pay for going around garbed in anything so out of fashion.

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