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, who won the Nobel Prize in 2003. Yet Mr. Coetzee’s decision to hand off the job of introducing his essays to Derek Attridge suggests a certain lofty detachment, which is entirely in keeping with his writerly temperament. Let the world make what it will of these essays, he seems to say; he himself will not argue for their coherence or pertinence. That Mr. Attridge is nowhere identified in the book itself — he is a South African-born professor of English at the University of York, and the author of “J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading” — only amplifies the seeming high-handedness.

Mr. Attridge’s task is, in fact, an ungrateful one. “Why might one be drawn to read a collection of the book reviews and literary introductions of a writer known above all for his fiction?” he asks, a bitf orlornly, at the start of his introduction; and he never finds a really compelling answer. The two possibilities he mentions — that Mr. Coetzee’s essays “will throw light on the often oblique novels,” or more broadly, that anything from Mr. Coetzee’s pen “is bound to have much to offer” — are canvassed hopefully, but Mr. Attridge finds himself unable to endorse either one wholeheartedly.

For while Mr. Coetzee has written highly penetrating criticism in the past — analyzing the dynamics of censorship in “Giving Offense” (1997), diagnosing the myths of South Africa in “White Writing” (1988) — the essays in “Inner Workings” almost deliberately defy the promise of the title. Of Mr. Coetzee’s own inner workings as a writer and thinker, this collection reveals little. His focus is resolutely on the lives and works of his subjects — 20 writers, mainly novelists, and one film, “The Misfits” — and he addresses them with chilly dispatch. Mr. Attridge suggests as much when he says that Mr. Coetzee, surprisingly, turns out to be “an ideal reviewer.” This is a kind of admission that he does not engage in the kind of intimate, polemical, intuitive criticism that makes Virginia Woolf’s essays, or Henry James’s prefaces, such valuable documents. Instead, he writes reviews—in particular, the magisterial but sterile kind on offer at the New York Review of Books, where most the pieces in “Inner Workings” first appeared.

The first half of “Inner Workings” is devoted to Central European writers of the interwar and postwar periods, many of them Jewish, including Italo Svevo, Walter Benjamin, Bruno Schulz, and Paul Celan. Mr. Coetzee’s focus on these writers is not exactly surprising — they constitute a compelling pantheon of martyred geniuses — but it is counter-intuitive, since their ways of writing and thinking seem distant from his own. Intellectually and spiritually, Mr. Coetzee has been shaped by the stringent, self-interrogating moralism of his Calvinist ancestors, and by the intolerable political dilemmas of apartheid South Africa. Novelistically, his greatest debt is to the stripped-down language and metaphysical pessimism of Samuel Beckett. His sensibility feels quite different from that of Mitteleuropa.

Perhaps that is why Mr. Coetzee’s appreciations of these writers remain at a respectful distance. Or perhaps it is because the kind of essay he writes for the New York Review is heavy on biographical information and plot summary, and short on literary criticism. There is remarkably little quotation in these essays, or sustained engagement with the way a particular passage or scene works. He tends to summarize deftly, rather than engage warmly: Benjamin’s style is “as instantly recognizable as it is inimitable,” Robert Musil’s fiction is “the evolving record of a confrontation between a man … and the times that gave birth to him.”

Only at moments does Mr. Coetzee seem to venture into more personal terrain, as when he describes the dilemma of Svevo as a writer of Triestine dialect. When he asks “whether there might have been Triestine truths that Svevo felt he could never get down on the Italian page,” we are reminded of Mr. Coetzee’s situation as a speaker of South African English and Afrikaans, who writes a neutral, international style of English. Does Mr. Coetzee also feel an affinity with Joseph Roth, who outlived Austria-Hungary just as Mr. Coetzee outlived the old South Africa? He does not say, and the reader is left to wonder how far Mr. Coetzee’s essays on these writers are driven by personal interest, how far by abstract curiosity or editorial urging.

It is in the second half of the book, when Mr. Coetzee turns to his contemporaries, that the temperature begins to rise. He is probably the only Nobel laureate to write so extensively about his peers, including Gabriel García Márquez, V.S. Naipaul, Saul Bellow, Günter Grass, and Nadine Gordimer; and he is happily unrestrained by mere collegiality. He is not afraid to say, for instance, that Mr. García Márquez’s most recent book, “Memories of My Melancholy Whores,” is ethically problematic in its thoroughly romanticized story of the seduction of a 14-year-old girl by a 90-year-old man. Although Mr. Coetzee doesn’t mention it, the reader can’t help being reminded of his own treatment of a similar encounter in “Disgrace,” where it becomes the focus of a dark meditation on sex, power, and guilt. Indeed, the possibility of love across differentials of power is Mr. Coetzee’s deepest theme, and whenever it surfaces in the work of other writers — as in Mr. Naipaul’s “Half a Life” and Ms. Gordimer’s “The Pickup” — his own critical response is heightened.

His review of “The Pickup” is the most passionate and personal essay in the book. Even here, Mr. Coetzee maintains the impersonal tone of the “ideal reviewer,” never explicitly acknowledging that he is reviewing South Africa’s other Nobel laureate, and the writer with whom he is most frequently contrasted. But even as he dutifully, extensively summarizes Ms. Gordimer’s plot, it is possible to see that Mr. Coetzee is sketching a critique of her solution to the problem of being a South African writer.

To Mr. Coetzee, Ms. Gordimer’s hopeful earnestness appears delusive, and her vision of a just future shallow: “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.

akirsch@nysun.com