In my constant and frustrating quest for good books I’ve often looked to the advice of authors I’ve liked, but more often to lists: lists of literary award winners, this or that list of the top novels of the century or decade or whatever. Often a name will pop up so many times in reviews or essays that I decide it must be read. The results vary. The name J. M. Coetzee came up a lot. He seems to have won every award out there, notably the Nobel Prize in Literature and he has the distinction of winning the Booker prize twice, as well as being on its long and short lists more or less constantly. The subject in which he thrives is the murky intricacies of South Africa, that Petri dish of racism, violence, resentment, of clashing entitlements and cultures.
Here is a great excerpt from an article written when he was getting the Booker prize for the second time. Except for the tee-totaling, he sounds like my kind of guy.
"Coetzee," says the writer Rian Malan, "is a man of almost monkish self-discipline and dedication. He does not drink, smoke or eat meat. He cycles vast distances to keep fit and spends at least an hour at his writing-desk each morning, seven days a week. A colleague who has worked with him for more than a decade claims to have seen him laugh just once. An acquaintance has attended several dinner parties where Coetzee has uttered not a single word."
Below I review each of Coetzee’s books that I’ve read in order from best to worst. Needless to say, all that follows is a spoiler—these stories will be so spoiled you’d think they were each an only child whose parents have guilt complexes—so I suggest reading the books first. (Toward the bottom I also spoil some of Roth’s early Zuckerman novels as well as Nabokov’s Pnin. As a rule nothing in these pages is safe from spoiling. Don’t think you may be able to read something without having a bomb dropped. After all the bombs are what it’s all about so I’d feel negligent not releasing them.)
Disgrace is the winner of the Booker Prize in 1999 and is on (if not at the top) of numerous other “best of” lists. It’s generally thought to be Coetzee’s best book. I think it is a compact masterpiece following the course of an “old school” man burnt out in the modern world forced to find compassion and some residual humanity—not to mention keep his dignity, his sanity—when thrust into a new world where the old rules don’t apply. A not-bad and very faithful film adaptation was made starring John Malkovich.
Requisite plot summary / reminder: David Lurie is a college professor who sleeps with a student and is fired after a scandal in which he refuses to cooperate with what he feels is a politically-correct Inquisitional tribunal. Lurie tries to be the old school romantic, to be the Byron hero standing up for himself in face of society’s demands, but he’s alone and out-dated in his thinking, those around him just won’t cooperate with such out-dated, against-the-grain stuff. Real-world historical movements are taking place and as a single man he must either conform or be broken. The only thing his romantic heroic efforts get him is disgrace, the first of which he swallows with a stoic resolve. He leaves Cape Town to visit his daughter Lucy in the countryside. It takes him some time to acclimate to the farming lifestyle and the people there. His daughter sells flowers and stuff and much of their time is taken up in caring for and euthanizing the huge population of stray dogs roaming about. Their farm is attacked by black thugs, his daughter raped and impregnated. Throughout the attack and its aftermath Lurie is impotent to help his daughter (as he sees it) or effect revenge or justice on the attackers. A neighboring black farmer who had once worked for Lucy and is related to the attackers rises in prominence and wants to take over his daughter’s farm. In contrast to Lurie’s rage and resistance Lucy is compliant and accepting. In the end Lurie must swallow his pride, accept the bitter pill of the changing world, and reconcile himself with injustice and a loss of control.
Dogs act as a kind of metaphor in Disgrace. Metaphors work best when they are practically ready-made, when they seem to smile ironically at their own double-meanings and get to work. The perceptive writer snatches them up and runs with them, letting them do half the work of resonating implications and weaving connections. Good metaphors are not just there for their own sake, to give the literate something with which they might be kept busy, but to unlock new ways of looking at something overly familiar. Coetzee uses dogs ingeniously.
Psychologists know to look at how a dog is treated in a family system to gauge its functionality. It works for societies as well. In Disgrace the dogs are unwanted and neglected, themselves the jetsam of a society barely able to keep itself functioning. South Africa is a sick dog, home to the world’s most vicious and dehumanizing system of racial apartheid, a society which in over-turning its racist system has only made another huge mess of itself. For instance, it leads the world in the rape and comes in second for murder. The treatment of dogs reflects not only the collapse of a society that can’t sustain them but the emotional disconnect (see Age of Iron below) and moral disorientation of that society’s people. With that comes an atmosphere that life is cheap, that people can and should exploit others. But now the exploited are getting revenge and it is at the same time deep-seated and pathological, but also mechanical, obligatory. Dogs aren’t black or white so they serve well to represent the moral ambiguity: both blacks and whites get fucked over in Coetzee’s South Africa. The tension is worse than thick, it breaks out into the worst kinds of random violence and there aren’t easy answers or sane solutions. People arm themselves with dogs as well, vicious attempts to control or stave off escalating ubiquitous violence, but they also resonate with the institutional violence of former Apartheid: dogs as objects of fear, police dogs. At the same time dogs are at the mercy of their masters, and of humans in general to care for them even in death. They can’t be euthanized fast enough and the job is left to compassionate volunteers (like Lucy and her friends). While reading it I kept thinking: Who’s going to put South Africa out of its misery? It seems you could take any of the book’s major themes: oppression, compassion, change, anger, power, protection, vulnerability, revenge, death and find it carried by the multifaceted dog metaphor. This isn’t to say a direct correspondence exists and the reader would be disappointed to attempt any such connecting of the dots. When I say dogs “carry” the metaphor I mean it on a more emotional-intuitive level, perhaps a more “atmospheric” metaphor if such a thing can be allowed. Not to belabor the point, or get off of the point, but I think dogs might work well for biological or evolutionary psychological reasons. I once read the idea that dogs are such good companions and are so “humanlike” because they have evolved to supply humans with certain recognizable human-like cues which are really “artificial”, but enable our anthropomorphizing tendency to fill in the blanks thus humanizing them. They put on the sad eyes and they get bones and stuff. There must be tons of examples of dogs as especially fitting literary devices. The one that comes most predominately to mind is The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy—even though that’s a wolf, but ironically its lack of human-like “connectability” is what makes it work in that tragic story.
Disgrace moves quickly, especially at the beginning, with a kind of damning economy like an indictment or report from the frontline. In his review Andrew Miller perfectly described it as having “an exhilarating bleakness”. Disgrace is Coetzee at his peak: all his best tricks and issues harmonized at the perfect inspired pitch.
Another great comparison to highlight the greatness of Coetzee’s South African novels is the highly allegorical film District 9, one of those potentially intelligent science fiction movies that quickly collapses into painful predictability and Hollywood action movie redundancy. It suffers from the wide-spread political disease which prefers things to be “black and white” so you know who and what is good and bad and what side you’re on and what to think about every scenario in its context. The reality is—and this is what makes great art like these novels of Coetzee—that people on both sides of an issue usually have dirty hands and that there is no harmless solution. People that get fucked over by an evil regime often become evil themselves. There are no groups of victimized saints out there. Now what? District 9 thought it was being smart by presenting nasty looking aliens that seemed at fault but then by degrees revealing them as intelligent “humane” creatures after all who were just reacting to the stupid prejudices of dumb greedy humans. It’s a facile metaphor. Talk about a good scenario being spoiled by morals for the masses. There are other apartheid movies out there, like this new one with about South African rugby players: Invictus. I doubt I’ll ever watch it. I’m hesitant to even approach these feel-good “inspirational” films, fearing the nausea brought on by cliché and self-congratulating easy moral stances that show me nothing new.
Waiting for the Barbarians would have to be Coetzee’s second best. Set in some vague centuries-past preindustrial colonial world it has the proper distance from the contemporary world but at same time it is so consistently redolent of its issues that it begs to be called a parable. The title comes from a Cavafy poem about an empire justifying its actions on the fear of a looming yet never seen enemy, a phenomenon familiar enough to draw constant comparisons: Big Brother, the Iraq war, etc. It’s as if Coetzee was commissioned to novelize the poem so faithful is it, especially its ending where expeditions return announcing the lack of barbarians.
Published in 1980 when Apartheid was in full swing (as were its mounting revolts), the distance of its setting is necessary in order to make broad statements. For him to have said the same thing in a contemporary setting would not work due to a lack of perspective—it would have been just another dissenting voice amid millions; it would have been so obvious as to lose effect, mere name-calling. Putting a comfortable fat magistrate (I imagine him wearing a powdered wig and those clunky shoes, a kind of lesser Handel) in a frontier town that is far off in space in time allows Coetzee to reacquaint the reader with colonial oppression by changing the types of people and how they live. If he were exploring these South African issues with a Boer and black South African as characters the deeper ethical points would never come to light for all the surface tension, all the particulars that would spark kneejerk leaps into political trenches. And what are these “issues”? First the obvious, the subject of Cavafy’s poem: how the dynamics of power perpetuate themselves by creating their own realities. But then the good ones: Can there ever be reconciliation between the oppressor and oppressed, even if the oppressor has come to see the error of their ways and even suffered for them? Is even that attempt still paternalistic? (And is paternalism really such an evil?) Is the damage done by a racist system too deep to be mended? How much is it the responsibility of “the other side” to meet their contrite (or former) oppressors half way? What would it take? Is the only solution to pack up and leave? (That’s eventually what Coetzee did.)
As in Disgrace Coetzee uses a man having sex with a compliant (but only compliant) female as symbolic of the complexities of colonialism. This is a brilliant way of going about it because if outright rape was chosen it would eliminate any of the realistic ambiguity that goes on in such a complex and neurotic society. Not every situation between the two sides is openly hostile or hateful—there can be even a degree of civility, perhaps friendliness. But there is always a defensive wall partly in the way and above it a cloud of the unresolved.
Waiting for the Barbarians is no doubt obliquely about the greater issues that have caused the mess of South Africa, but it also stands on its own. The riveting expedition into the wilds is out of an American western and if it had been written yet I would have had no doubt Coetzee read Blood Meridian, that masterpiece of godforsaken wastelands toying with its trespassers. The protagonist is believably caught between naiveté and awareness so you can sympathize with his efforts but also see their tragic futility. You can also see much of what is coming, but Coetzee manages to unfold events quickly and with a clinical but honest eye for the grotesque and the wretched that makes it a worthy read.
Age of Iron
Much of what I said about Waiting for the Barbarians—about the relationship between the oppressor and oppressed, about the difficulties of reconciliation—applies here as well. Written ten years later the difference with Age of Iron is its explicit handling of apartheid. Apartheid means “aparthood”. If you’re living in such an institutionalized state you are going to be on one side or the other. The white protagonist is Mrs. Curren, a liberal, educated woman (an ex-Latin teacher!) dying of cancer—in many ways she seems to represent the death of her rarified type. She never agreed with the system but had been born and raised into it—as was Coetzee. Can one be removed from the “other side” and live morally? Unless you have gone through what they have gone through can you remain innocent?
She is visited upon by a homeless and practically mute drunk who ends up staying in her house. We learn little about his past, how he came to be a broken man, broken as if by the diseased institution or maybe he represents the institution itself, once virile but now nonfunctional and prey to the violence and revenge of those young men of steel rising to take revenge and regain respect for what their people have gone through. That is the Iron Age of the title. It not only alludes to the most debased of the metallurgical ages of decline as conceived by the ancients, but to the emotionless resolve and hardened hearts of the youth of the End of Apartheid, they who through suffering and dehumanization and maybe even some demagoguery gain tenacity and courage at the expense of compassion and reasoning. Curran worries that in hardening their hearts and minds they are losing their humanity, but she’s told by her black maid with whom she has had an amiable and respectful (yet always slightly distance) relationship and whose children have been caught up in revolutionary violence, that she is proud of her children and they will be the future. (I have to imagine these are the youths that return later in Disgrace as roving thugs.) Perhaps through some recognition of her own guilt she stumbles into a Dantean journey into “the other side”, how they live, what they go through, the degraded conditions, the rage and the violence against them. In the end it’s not clear if this is supposed to be redemptive or otherwise illuminating, but it is an attempt at the possibility. It is if nothing else an eye-opening shock to the system.
Again Coetzee puts before us moral dilemmas of a tragic scale. Nobody’s totally right or wrong. There doesn’t seem to be a correct position to be found. It’s difficult to realize that victims have their faults, their own sickness and that the relatively harmless good liberal is not so good in their passivity and that none of it is really the fault of any of them. South Africa and its apartheid system is like an evil machine that only creates products more defective and morally flawed no matter how much it is tinkered with. It’s almost a twist of so-called reverse discrimination—a theme, or at least a version of it, that comes up constantly in these Coetzee novels: because of your white skin you can be decent and fair and moral and even outspoken against the regime and its history, but the reality of the regime remains and you are on the wrong side of the aparthood.
The above novels I classify under his South African novels. The remaining would be classified as the Australian to where Coetzee eventually expatriated. I can’t help but think that these books represent a later “Post-South Africa” phase for Coetzee, but it is unfortunate because that diseased and disoriented land fed him his best material. If his Age of Iron is early Bronze Age, Waiting for the Barbarians is later Bronze, and Disgrace is Golden Age then with the Australian novels there was a sharp and unorderly decline to the Iron Age, or worse: the Postmodern Age. The Post-South Africa novels are not good. Coetzee comes off as an old geezer publishing books for old geezers. Hell, you win the prizes Coetzee has won, they’ll publish anything you write on a napkin.
Diary of a Bad Year
This book is not painfully bad, but it is not especially good either. I associate it with sitting on a bus to New York next to some female stranger, my legs going numb from the cramped conditions and feeling like a real creep because the outrageous heading of the one chapter heading was On Paedophilia—but I refused to put it away because I had nothing else to read and also mentally I raised a weak fist in defense of literature and artistic license which was what the chapter was kind of about in a non-lurid harmless way.
The novel begins as an old intellectual’s fictitious philosophical manifesto, but it soon evolves into footnoted musings and perspectives of three characters: the aforementioned author, then an attractive young woman he meets in his building and finally her boyfriend. As the manifesto continues at the top of the page they in turn muse in diary form on their encounters with one another while the man works on that manifesto. The reader gets all their perspectives separately but also simultaneously on the same page which splits horizontally and runs as two or three parallel texts. It then becomes an upstairs-downstairs Three’s Company trope contrasting the generation gap of a foolish old man and his dated radical leftist ideas with those of trendy jaded youth, their rocky relationship, and the old guy’s increasing and embarrassing absurd romantic fantasies about this girl whom he hires as a typist. The insinuation or fragmentation of the additional perspectives begins when the old author looks at this young girl’s ass and she wiggles it to toy with him (we find out from her) and then the boyfriend gets jealous and so on. The reader is supposed to find and appreciate connections of some kind between those different levels. The idea is that their more personal thoughts conflict, often ironically, with the cerebral, idealistic text of the manifesto. It is so post-modern it must serve as an illustrious example on some college literature class syllabus. (Coetzee was at one point a literature professor.) It’s just not particularly interesting although it wasn’t too tedious and it was all over quickly wrapping itself up in about 60,000 words.
Nabokov’s Pale Fire must be the most famous example of this hypertextual gimmick. In it a man named Kinbote edits the magnum opus of a dead poet with whom he says he was friends. Kinbote’s footnotes increasingly overshadow the poem itself, becoming the bulk of the novel. Although Nabokov is one of my favorites I’ve never been able to get through the book. It’s a pain in the ass that doesn’t pay off—at least not soon enough. More time is spent on the logistics of how to go about reading it—should you bookmark with your thumb or a bookmark, read each part separately, etc—than on if its value outweighs the inconvenience. Much of Diary of a Bad Year is indebted to Nabokov but only in a hats-off to the master superficial way. The old man / young woman motif as well as some more overt references make the connection more conscious. But who cares?
Unfortunately for me the only meat in Diary of a Bad Year was in the philosophical ideas—nothing mind-blowing but refreshingly engaging, even if it isn’t meant to be taken seriously. (I’m a sucker for manifestoes.) I would have liked its ideas to be more integrated into the rest of the book, but again, more energy is spent ridiculing them as old fashioned like the protagonist than mining them for what they’re worth. Later Coetzee seems to be off-focus—or is it there is just nothing on which to focus? Undoubtedly a lot more could be said in this vein, but I just don’t care enough to try, I want the content of the old Coetzee. If not for his name on the cover you would never think it was the same author—and maybe it never would have been published. All the intense moral Gordian knots of the South-African novels are completely gone. It is now just playful postmodernism: the ironic, self-conscious, juxtaposing and tossing about of ideas, and ideas about ideas, and ideas about how ideas are presented. It sounds like it would be cool but these things always become a bore.
Slow Man
Reading this awful book I imagined Coetzee running into a plot glue trap: one morning he reads was he has recently written and he finds what had potential simply isn’t moving along, the character and story suddenly lack potential and momentum, that whatever he had that drove his previous novels has dried up. He’s gotten old and stale and lacking vigor—exactly like his character Paul Rayment (the name evokes “remnant”) who’s had what dull life he had curtailed by an accident that claimed his leg—he is an amputee. And then Coetzee’s does what authors seem to like to do when they run out of ideas: they write about imagination and the creative process, about the function and meaning of art and the artist. It becomes metafiction. One has to handle this device carefully—it all too easily becomes an instrument of banal masturbation and triviality. (To tell the truth I can’t tell you how sick I am of this device which seems to be everywhere I turn in books and film. Isn’t it really an egotism and a narcissism to make art about being an artist? Does nobody have anything to say about life or the world in general? The next time I read a novel within a novel I’m going to throw it across the room like Kingsley Amis did when reading his son Martin’s book and a character appeared named Martin Amis.) I think Nabokov is the only one that has managed to pull this off successfully when his narrators or protagonists hint that they stretch beyond the confines of their conscious place and this in turn makes the artistic pretense conscious of itself. It is a form of higher irony. This ploy culminates in Pnin—also about a pathetic and lonely old man looking to somehow connect with the life he never had, but Nabokov never made that the point of his books alone, but rather another facet of interest. Even a powerful writer like Philip Roth doesn’t do much with the “art about art” theme in his early Zuckerman novels The Ghost Writer and Zuckerman Unbound. The former especially questions the value of sacrifice gratis artis and he does it in an intelligent way—e.g. by positing the theory that Anne Frank lived and grew up but remained anonymous and silent vis a vis the publication of her memoirs. I read that now as a young Roth reflecting on his assured future as a novelist and the life changes of his fame.
Coetzee’s gimmick takes the form of an alter-ego novelist from an earlier novel, the titular Elizabeth Costello, who barges into this one, and who makes clear that in some tricky, vague and annoying way Rayment is her character and her sudden introduction into the plot is to bring life to the failure he is as a man and a character and mover of plot. She is the attempt of the author’s creative imagination to make something of Rayment. Rayment’s character is The Problem of the Novel. The overused conventions of the novel as trope and wish-fulfillment find themselves truncated, bed-ridden in need of an original jumpstart. I suppose next we’ll hear that eulogy that there’s nothing new under the sun, that all possibilities have been used up, that the only place to go is to reflect on this sorry state of affairs in such witty ways as these. Well gosh Coetzee, was it really that long ago you did the impossible and wrote great novels of depth? (Funny true story that I cannot resist telling. Long ago a young hip art school woman was telling me about another of this same species, how he always got artsy girls to take off their shirts for the sake of his “photography”. And how did he manage this feat? What was his justification—or was it hers? I never figured that out—for this hiply unhip bypassing of any artistic pretension? Well it was the old story: everything’s been done, there are no more new ideas. But of course! What else can you do? I’ll have to try that some time. Who ever said nihilism can’t be fun?)
The problem with all this postmodern metafictional stuff is it is a neat idea—especially to talk about—but while reading it we don’t care, we’re just going through the motions. We can nod to the metafiction and quickly exhaust its intention, but then we are left with its own necessary evil: a boring character and plot that goes nowhere despite the limp meditations on life and loss. Nabokov knew to keep Pnin short. My god how I wanted this tedious book to be over, with only the dimmest hope of a cheap twist at the end to make my time invested worth it. I didn’t even get that. Coetzee’s prose is flat throughout, but without that “exhilarating bleakness” to be found in the South Africa novels. Maybe its lameness is intentional, but again, we have to sit through this, we invest our valuable time in this metafictional jerking-off.
Coetzee’s style is a precarious one. If he’s going to keep his intentions shrouded in mile off parables the reader has to be given something tasty to chew on while weighing the middlebrow postmodern statements in the back of their head That’s why Disgrace worked and these later novels don’t. All sorts of feasible fucked-up shit happens to Lurie and the reader wants revenge and resolution but the real world won’t satisfy those needs. All this postmodern reflection on the meaning of art in today’s world is like the daily rituals of a retiree enjoying his breakfast and morning walk and ranting on about old stories. Although Coetzee has repatriated to Australia and has a secure Nobel-prize-supported carte blanche to publish whatever he writes, a world still goes on with many good stories, with many divisive issues. I don’t blame him for leaving the frustrating hell of South Africa, but that doesn’t mean it’s time to write this dilettantism, or if he does the book should come with warning labels not the usual accolades.
