Ice King

In his latest fictionalized autobiography, Coetzee delivers a meditation on the limits of art - and himself

December 27, 2009|Brock Clarke

It seems churlish to complain about a J.M. Coetzee novel being cold. Because you know it will be cold; this is one of the givens of a Coetzee novel. As such, you should begin one of his books the way you would prepare, mentally, for a stay in one of those ice hotels in Quebec, or wherever: You will not, you tell yourself, complain about the cold; you will instead wonder at how such an object - a novel, a hotel - can be built out of such unpromising material. You will find beauty in the chilliness; you will even find moments where you can say, you know, this isn’t as unbelievably cold as I thought it was going to be.

Which brings us to Coetzee’s latest book, “Summertime.’’ “Summertime’’ is - after “Boyhood: Scenes from a Provincial Life’’ and “Youth: Scenes from a Provincial Life II’’ - the third volume in which Coetzee fictionalizes his autobiography. It’s also presumably the last. That is because in this book the fictional John Coetzee is dead, and his English biographer is setting out to read fragments of Coetzee’s notes from the early 1970s (the period when he returned to South Africa from the United States and lived with his elderly father), and to interview people who mattered to Coetzee. In fact, much of the novel comes to us in the form of interview transcripts. And what we learn, basically, from these intimate expert witnesses is that Coetzee was . . . cold.

Seriously, this is what we learn. And whether this information is intended to be big news, or whether it is intended to be taken as sign of Coetzee’s sense of playful self-deprecation, it is, at the beginning of the novel, irksome in that it only confirms what we already think we know about the man and his work.

Indeed, the novel’s first interviewee (Julia, a married South African woman with whom Coetzee had an affair) seems to exist not only to confirm our expectations about the sex appeal of the chilly Coetzee (“he had no sexual presence whatsoever. It was as though he had been sprayed head to toe with a neutralizing spray, a neutering spray’’) but also as proof that Coetzee not only knows himself, but also knows his characters, and what he knows about them is that they are emotionally and tonally similar to him.

After Julia and Coetzee have a brief conversation about Coetzee’s family, Julia says, “They have always interested me, these exchanges between human beings when the words have nothing to do with the traffic of thoughts through the mind.’’ To which the reader might have these three reactions: “Yes, you sound really interested”; “You sound exactly like Coetzee”; and “Can a novel thrive when all its characters sound like Coetzee?”