When scholars talk about why readers sink their teeth into works of literary or narrative journalism, customarily they focus on a feeling of immersion, or being “caught up in the story” and/or its descriptive details. As John Hartsock has emphasized, the longform writer dispenses with the so-called “triangle” lead, and instead our brains are transported into a recreated time, place, and action.

Even so, I am often struck by how much my own engagement is driven by what literary scholars and Composition theorists often call the narrative “voice” of a given nonfiction story.  (For one of the best meditations on this subject, read Lad Tobin’s reflections in TriQuarterly.) For me, voice is often the “ice-breaker” well before immersion fully sets in. In short, I like some voices and some I don’t.

As it happens, though, literary scholars have often debated whether “voice” is the correct word to be using here. For one thing, when we read, we aren’t “hearing” an audio recording, exactly. Wayne Booth famously insisted that we should refer instead to an “implied author”—and in fact, that strikes me as the default assumption for many who read a work of nonfiction. But what if we did think of this moment as also establishing a voice—a term we use for the combination of tone, the degree of formality, word choice, point of view, syntax and more—that typically distinguishes the personality of a writer? 

Take Janet Malcolm. Malcolm is famous for arguing, of course, that there’s about as much connection between the actual journalist behind the narrative and the one on the page as there is between Clark Kent and Superman. (I’ve critiqued this analogy elsewhere.) To her, the journalist on the page usually a self-effacing figure for dispassionate authority. But what strikes me as so complicated about Malcolm’s formulation is that her own voice usually creates anything but all that. On the contrary. Take these lines from her account of a legal trial, The Crime of Sheila McGough (1999), where she’s discussing a “transaction” between a lawyer and two other parties. An arrangement that, as is customary for a Malcolm tale, goes completely off the rails:

The chronicler of [this] transaction . . . begins to lose his bearings soon after the fatal downpayment. . . . At this juncture, he is like a motorist driving on a clear night who suddenly runs into a stretch of swirling, low-lying mist and must creep along using his dim headlights to try and see. [All the parties] have . . . testified about this murky moment, but their accounts, as well as lacking in explanatory power, are so contradictory that historical reconstruction based on them is impossible.

Historical reconstruction in all cases gives rise to structures that are more like ruins than proper buildings; there is never enough solid building material and always too much dust. (19)

Considered from the vantage point of style, this is wild stuff:

• Quite formal diction, counterbalanced by extravagant conceits doubling down on each other;
• A tone of cruel impassivity about how wrong-headed every one of her informants are;
• bold formulations that claim to be about “murky” facts but which come forth as moral or interpretive absolutes; she’s really present here, not “effacing” herself at all; and
• Malcolm’s trademark twist: that she herself is one of the chroniclers she’s hypothesizing about.  Perhaps the main one.

Rather like Joan Didion, Malcolm has a way of launching a paragraph that becomes a labyrinth of misdirection, moral absolutism, and yet also confession—a bit like the murky road she’s describing, or the seer choking on dust. (Lots of debts to American noir here, as I see it.)

Again, I myself disagree with a lot of her theorizing even while I’m reading her. But c’mon: you gotta love the voice.