[While reading Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams,] the reader feels as though he is looking at a Sylvia Plath pickled in a laboratory jar….

What we see is not altogether pleasant. Sylvia Plath had an uncommon desire to be a writer…. Her notebook entries reveal her to have been an anxious user of events for the sake of words. Obsessively, she searches for material, for interesting events in life around her; but behind the frantic recording of detail lies a transparent boredom with life….

Reading the notebooks and stories side by side is illuminating not just in the sense of tracing how an artist reworks material from her life into her fiction. Even more revealing is how the flat, dispassionate tones of the notebook carry over into the stories and explain their emotional shallowness. In both places, Plath is the quintessential observer. She watches people closely...