Private Matters: In Defense of the Personal Life

Yes, Smith is Bernard Malamud's daughter. As she says in her prologue, it was this accident of birth that started her thinking about privacy. In the past few years, much of the writing on this subject has been about the legal ramifications, about the right to privacy, but Smith approaches it primarily as a practicing social worker and therapist and as a woman of letters. The first several chapters take as their focus daytime television programs, Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry Ward Beecher, and together they describe the evolution of privacy from the constant scrutiny of a community to its replacement today by an occasional cramped intimacy with a few people and the (often electronic) surveillance of bureaucracies, businesses--and in a more complex way, the communal gaze of the talk show. In subsequent sections on Dr. Jekyll and on Richard Rhodes's Making Love, the therapist's voice is stronger; she examines function and dysfunction of our societally determined internal critic or observer--of our superego, if you will--and its relationship to self-control and to shame. In sections on the biographer's art and presidential scrutiny, one hears the voice of the daughter of a famous man. In her last, Smith describes the paradox of women's ""private realm"" historically failing to accomplish the great task of privacy, which consists ""not in isolating people, but in allowing them temporary space in which they may accomplish important human tasks that are otherwise thwarted."" With graceful aptness, Smith cites the works of philosophers, historians and sociologists such as Philippe Aries, Georges Duby, Sissela Bok and Amitai Etzioni. But she is equally assured in her use of literary allusions and personal anecdotes that are always illuminating, never self-indulgent or pretentious. (May)