Laureate’s Lament
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
“If equal affection cannot be, / Let the more loving one be me,” W.H. Auden wrote. The lines could serve as an ironic motto to the work of J.M. Coetzee, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2003. No novelist has been so obsessed by the dilemmas of unequal affection, especially when the inequality is not just emotional but social and political. If fairy tales teach that love is a leveler – that the peasant can marry the princess – Mr. Coetzee’s novels have always insisted on the reverse: that love across an imbalance of power is not only helpless but corrupt. This fatalism may be the most important legacy of Mr. Coetzee’s upbringing as an Afrikaaner in apartheid South Africa, a fate which he seldom writes about directly, but which constantly informs his allegorical fictions.
The hero of a Coetzee novel is typically trapped by a privilege which he knows is unjust, but which he is unable to renounce, even as it taints his most intimate relationships. The situation comes up in Mr. Coetzee’s fiction with the regularity of an obsession. There is the Magistrate of “Waiting for the Barbarians,” in love with a barbarian girl who has been captured and tortured; the prison doctor in “Life and Times of Michael K,” who tries to befriend the bewildered and suspicious Michael; and Susan Barton, who cannot learn the true story of the mute, enslaved Friday in “Foe.” Even Mr. Coetzee’s famous concern for animal rights seems driven and haunted by this same predicament: What could be more unequal than the love of a human for an animal?
For its first 80 pages, “Slow Man” (Viking, 265 pages, $24.95) seems to promise another variation on Mr. Coetzee’s favorite theme. As the book opens, Paul Rayment, a retired photographer in the Australian city of Adelaide, is riding his bicycle when he is struck by a car: “The blow catches him from the right, sharp and surprising and painful, like a bolt of electricity.” When he wakes up in the hospital, he finds that his right leg has been amputated above the knee, leaving only a revolting stump, “less like a cured ham than like some sightless deep-water fish.” Still more shocking than the injury, to the aloof and arrogant Rayment, is his sudden loss of independence, which forces him to submit to the condescending ministrations of nurses, doctors, and friends.
Rayment has almost lost hope when the nursing agency sends him Marijana Jokic, a middle-aged Croatian immigrant. Marijana is not especially beautiful, and she treats Rayment as a patient, no more; but her respectful care so soothes his wounded pride that his gratitude turns rapidly into love. It is the latest incarnation of Mr. Coetzee’s old theme: For Rayment’s love, as even he dimly recognizes, is deeply selfish, indifferent to the obstacles posed by Marijana’s marriage, her status as a kind of servant, and her precarious position as a new immigrant in Australia. Rayment’s love becomes patronizing in the most concrete sense when he offers to pay for Marijana’s son, the handsome teenager Drago, to go to an expensive private school. Mr. Coetzee’s cool, impartial prose compels the reader to interrogate the true sources of Rayment’s feelings, even at their most ardent and apparently generous:
What does he want of the woman? He wants her to smile again, certainly, to smile on him. He wants to win a place in her heart, however tiny. … He wants to love and cherish her and her children. … He wants to take care of them, all of them, protect them and save them.
But of course, the person from whom the family really needs to be protected is Rayment himself, with his intrusive, lordly generosity and impetuous declarations. For its first third, “Slow Man” promises to be one of Mr. Coetzee’s best treatments of the delusions of love, all the more powerful because his approach is realistic and contemporary, rather than timelessly allegorical.
Then, on page 79, something happens to make the reader’s heart sink: Elizabeth Costello comes to pay Paul Rayment a visit. Costello, the title character of Mr. Coetzee’s last book, is his alter ego, a celebrated Australian novelist whose career and opinions closely parallel Mr. Coetzee’s own. In “Elizabeth Costello,” Mr. Coetzee sent his proxy on a tour of American college campuses, where she delivered lectures that may or may not represent Mr. Coetzee’s own views on animal rights, religion, and the nature of fiction. The problem with “Elizabeth Costello,” however, was that the questions she seems designed to raise – what is the relation between an author and his creations? What kind of belief does a fiction demand from the reader? – are not just well-worn, but unfruitful. A novelist who constantly asks about what it means to be a novelist is like Achilles racing the tortoise: Every possible step forward is divided and subdivided until movement becomes impossible.
By introducing Elizabeth Costello into “Slow Man,” Mr. Coetzee substitutes dull metafictional questions for the interesting fictional questions he has been in the process of asking. Costello breaks into Paul’s story, which it turns out she herself has been writing, because she is dissatisfied with his progress. She finds him too cold, wary, and undramatic to be a successful protagonist: “Do something,” she begs him, “Do anything. Surprise me.” Costello begins to interfere in Paul’s life to make it more lively, introducing him to another woman and forcing him to confront his beloved Marijana. But each of her authorial interventions is useless; Paul remains a “slow man,” slowed not just by his injury but by his self-protective coldness.
The relationship between Costello and Rayment does offer some food for thought. Does an author control his characters, Mr. Coetzee asks, or do they exist in some way beyond his grasp? Certainly the ending of “Slow Man,” which finds Costello and Rayment at an impasse, suggests that even fictional lives are less susceptible to manipulation than the reader casually supposes. But these questions are so laboriously posed, and so much less humanly interesting than the relationship between Paul and Marijana, that all Mr. Coetzee finally accomplishes in “Slow Man” is to run a promising novel off the rails. An admirer of Mr. Coetzee’s earlier work must hope that, in his next book, he will stop asking questions about novels and get back to writing them.