SOURCE: Bayley, John. “Fresh Oysters.” New York Review of Books 48, no. 19 (29 November 2001): 18-20.

In the following excerpt, Bayley states that in Reading Chekhov, Malcolm masterfully blends personal insight with literary evaluation and social commentary about the life and works of Anton Chekhov.

In her thoughtful and sensitive study Reading Chekhov, which she describes in a subtitle as a “Critical Journey,” Janet Malcolm writes of seeing a dreary production of Carmen in St. Petersburg—just the kind of boring evening that Chekhov might have featured in a story—in the course of which her own boredom was relieved by recalling that moment in “The Lady with the Little Dog” when two schoolboys, illicitly smoking in the cheap seats, see, with their own kind of boredom, Gurov, the “hero” of the tale, kissing the face and hands of Anna, with whom he has fallen deeply in love. Janet Malcolm also...