Arts+ Selects

J.M. COETZEE
Inner Workings

Unusually for a book of essays by a living writer, "Inner Workings" (Viking, 304 pages, $25.95), the latest collection of literary criticism by J.M. Coetzee, comes with an introduction from another hand. If any novelist has the right to avail himself of this privilege of the posthumous, it is surely Mr. Coetzee. But while Mr. Coetzee has written penetrating criticism in the past, the essays in "Inner Workings" almost deliberately defy the promise of the title. His focus is resolutely on the lives and works of his subjects, and he addresses them with chilly dispatch. The hopeful earnestness of a writer such as fellow Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer appears delusive: "Gordimer's justice may thus be said to have an ideal quality. What it cannot be said to have is a spiritual dimension," he writes. The passage reminds us Mr. Coetzee is an intensely spiritual writer, who writes less about political injustice, which might be repaired, than about sin and evil, which cannot. In this guarded expression of despair, we hear what is all too often missing from "Inner Workings" — Mr. Coetzee's true voice.