Meta: When It Works

‘Disgrace’ blew me away when I first read it years ago, but some of Coetzee’s later works have left me a little cold.  Hadn’t read him a quite a while, and was pleased to find a pristine and inexpensive copy of ‘Slow Man’ at a used bookstore in Lincoln, Nebraska.  (Rather a large store with a big fiction section where there was not one book by Philip Roth.  So much for New Jersey Jews in Nebraska.)

He did win the Nobel, after all.

‘Slow Man’, like ‘The Fourth Hand’, centers on a main character that experiences severe injury from a disabling accident.  In both novels the devastation is significant, but the loss is also a spur to human and psychological growth.  The disability is sudden and shocking, and recovery takes time.  In both cases the characters do not return to their pre-accident states, but move forward (in ways both uncertain and complex) to new more complete and true modes of being.  Interesting parallels.

 So happy to reconnect with Coetzee’s prose style.  Very direct, almost terse, quite masculine, but at the same time curiously graceful without being the least bit self-conscious or ‘poetic’ in a forced way.  Not a common combination.

But for me the most appealing aspect of the book is Elizabeth Costello, a character that appears in many of Coetzee’s works.  Here she materializes from nowhere to poke and prod Paul (the injured man) into significant movement away from his customary reclusive and passive habits.  Costello is an author, and Paul is her character.  She’s somehow stuck with him.  She doesn’t know what to do with him.  She has to wait for him to act.  She makes many suggestions about what he might do, but she can’t make decisions for him.  He has to figure it out for himself.  Coetzee manages all of this with a very light touch.  It’s both humorous and serious.  It’s real and it’s not.  Reminded me of the gods in Banville’s ‘The Infinities’.  They do their best to direct human affairs, but their influence is limited and they are preoccupied with their own all-too-human concerns amongst themselves.  Here Costello too has her own needs which play into the action, especially at the end. I’m really not sure how Coetzee brings it off with such grace.  It doesn’t feel like science fiction, and it doesn’t have a preachy modern meta-literature (“Watch me do something really cool here”) feel about it either.  It’s playful, fun, and telling.

There’s also much here about the differences between love and care, about the concept of home, and about family connections.  Lots of food for thought.  Ultimately we do have the power to revise our own rules and definitions as we choose.  We are our own authors.  But as authors we have to work with the human material we have.  We can reconsider, make suggestions, cheerlead, wag a finger, or cajole.  We can hope that our characters reward us with complexity, change, humanity, and insight.  Sometimes we are pleased with the result, sometimes not.  But we can always try just one more draft.  Maybe this will be the one?