Diary of a Bad Year [Paperback]

Coetzee's latest novel sits in the 'old man lit' tradition, a small genre presided over mainly by the world's most elderly, most eminent male writers (Philip Roth at the forefront) who realize in their developing senescence that their life's work of masterful literary output, mantlepieces groaning with awards, and thousands of acolytes are scant consolation when the one thing they really want - to sleep with beautiful young women, is denied them due to the linear nature of time that withers all in the end.

The novel in keeping with late period Coetzee is a meta-fiction. An eminent 72 year old novelist living in Sydney, John C (a bit like the real JC) is asked by a German publisher to write a series of essays for an anthology entitled 'Strong Opinions' (clear Nabokovian overtones, I'm not sure why). The book is split into three sections. The top of each page contains the essays that John C writes take up about half the book: thoughtful, cerebral pieces from a liberal bent covering a multitude of current topics such as the nature of the state, the state of universities, the slaugher of animals (strong Coetzee territory), tourism, Tony Blair, you name it.

Running parallel to these essays are little itsy-bitsy slivers of novel proper, telling the story of John C encountering a sultry young woman in the laundry room of his apartment building and paying her to become his secretary to type up his manuscript. Things become complex as the woman, Anya, who is little more than a bimbo, tells her boyfriend Alan, an investment consultant, what she is up to. Ideologies and male egos clash as Alan and John C eye each other up suspiciously, each questioning the other's motives, leading to a messy entanglement.

Diary of a Bad year is an elegant, intellectual curiosity of a novel. It provides much to think about, and does capture many of the anxieties of people living in contemporary democracies. But there is rarely substantial meat for the reader to sink his or her teeth into. John C says at one point that writing a novel entails making like Atlas, holding an entire world on your shoulders, a task he no longer has the energy for. Perhaps the real John Coetzee feels the same. It looks as if his 1999 masterpiece 'Disgrace' will be the last novel proper we get from him, and now we must be satisfied with a mixture of essay and plays on the nature of fiction and writing. This book will, like Coetzee's two previous novels, Elizabeth Costello and Slow Man, appeal more to the reader who wants a challenging account of ideas and sexual desire rather than a good old fashioned story.

Short version: the opinions are intentionally pompous and banal. J.C. is not Coetzee.

Long version:

This is the third book in a series that began with Elizabeth Costello and continued with Slow Man. These books are fundamentally about being a writer who has won the Nobel Prize. Perhaps Coetzee keeps writing them because some people haven't yet figured out that his fictional characters' opinions are not his own; perhaps, as a writer already drowning in consciousness of tradition and context, he feels that these are the only sorts of books he can now write. I tell people when they read these books: remember that Coetzee has won the Nobel Prize, and think about what that means to him and what it means to people's opinions of him. In having this title thrust on him, he is no longer any old author, but a certain sort of elder statesman. And being the sort of writer he is, he cannot let that stand unquestioned. And since academics are still using the animal rights sections in Elizabeth Costello as though they were freestanding philosophical essays, Coetzee takes further steps in Diary of a Bad Year to make it clear that the "philosophy" in the book is hardly meant to be taken seriously as philosophy. Out goes Elizabeth Costello; in comes J.C., a Nobel Prize winning South African novelist now living in Australia, just like Coetzee, except dumber.

The structure of the novel, in brief: several voices, those of a writer, J.C.; his amanuensis and crush, a cosmopolitan Filipina named Anya; Anya's financier/scammer husband Alan; and most of all, the writings of J.C. as typed up by Anya. The writings are divided into two sections, one called "Strong Opinions," written for some sort of German literary publication, and later on, "Soft Opinions," written for Anya. Since these sections co-exist on each page, the book resists reading in an easy rhythm, as any attempt to read the three sections in parallel, especially early on, results in continual jarring shifts as the highfaluting tone of the "Strong Opinions" is undercut by J.C.'s earnest and vaguely creepy obsession with Anya and Anya's own sardonic detachment. In some ways it comes as a respite, as the "Strong Opinions"--on the War on Terror, on torture, on intelligent design, and on other urgent political issues of the day--quickly become unbearably pompous, banal, and irritating. They are filled with cliched homilies familiar to anyone who has read the New York Review of Books in the last seven years and dilettantish excursions into areas that J.C. knows nothing about. I winced when reading his "opinion" on Guantanamo Bay that begins:

"Someone should put together a ballet under the title Guantanamo, Guantanamo! A corps of prisoners, their ankles shackled together, thick felt mittens on their hands, muffs over their ears, black hoods over their heads, do the dances of the persecuted and desperate...In a corner, a man on stilts in a Donald Rumsfeld mask alternately writes at his lectern and dances ecstatic little jigs."

Had I read these opinions in a Philip Roth or John Updike book, I would take them at face value and discount the author accordingly. But Coetzee is too smart, and any comparison of the "Strong Opinions" to his real opinions in his thoughtful, careful essays makes the difference blindingly apparent. (It does take something approaching guts for a Nobel Laureate to write something so profoundly trite and irritating and attribute it to his own ostensible fictional proxy.) As with many literary intellectuals, J.C.'s excursions into math and science are particularly stupid. By the time J.C. writes, "I continue to find evolution by random mutation and natural selection not just unconvincing but preposterous as an account of how complex organisms come into being" and invokes Heisenberg without knowing what uncertainty even is, it's obvious that Coetzee has no wish even to defend thes opinions; he is making them transparently foolish so that readers examine the rhetoric rather than the opinions. Underneath the sanctimonious white male liberal pablum, including defenses of pornography, Adorno-esque cultural snobbery in indictments of rock music, latent sexism (captured especially well, complete with tired attack on Catherine MacKinnon), and sympathy with enemies of whom he knows nothing, there bleeds the personality that is revealed in J.C.'s internal voice lower on the page. With most would-be political commentators in the literati, it is not quite so obvious, but in J.C., Coetzee gives us tools for easily making the connection.

For it is Anya who carries the voice objecting to the "Strong Opinions." Alan picks up this critique later in a less sympathetic fashion, but it is Anya who connects J.C.'s emotional life with what he writes on the page. I felt great relief to hear her articulate my thoughts (and no doubt those of many other readers) when she politely tells J.C.:

"OK. This may sound brutal, but it isn't meant that way. There is a tone--I don't know the best word to describe it--a tone that really turns people off. A know-it-all tone. Everything is cut and dried: I am the one with all the answers, here is how it is, don't argue, it won't get you anywhere. I know that isn't how you are in real life, but that is how you come across, and it is not what you want. I wish you would cut it out. If you positively have to write about the world and how you see it, I wish you could find a better way."

So we lead to the real problem, which is J.C.'s impotence in the face of the current world horrors and the disastrous results of the obligation he feels to be relevant. As the book continues on and reveals J.C.'s ignorance of the world in several ways, Coetzee spares him little criticism, but does ultimately make a case for his real art in the form of the lovely, impressionistic "Soft Opinions," short lyrical reflections in the last half of the book that mercifully replace the "Strong Opinions." These vignettes are written with Anya in mind and with no attempt to be politically incisive. J.C. describes his dreams, his doubts, his age, his friends, and his passions, as antiquated and pedantic as they may be. Most of all, he makes no attempt to suppress the "I" out of the fear that he must pretend to be something he is not in order to address the world with urgency. There is some resignation in this shift, but also great relief; J.C.'s mask has fallen and he returns to himself. It puts him in correct proportion to the thoughtful but non-bookish Anya and her powerful but cowardly husband Alan, and the shift in tone allows him to have a visible, evident effect on Anya, one (it is implied) far greater than that of telling a bunch of would-be intellectual liberals what they already know and having them feel good about it because it's coming from a Nobel Prize winner.

Coetzee has always been interested in the intersection between fiction and politics. DISGRACE, his most famous novel, is a somewhat traditional story set in the specific political context of post-apartheid South Africa. His earlier WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS, set in an unnamed place and time, uses fiction as a parable for political repression in almost any age, not least our own. But in his latest work, DIARY OF A BAD YEAR, Coetzee reverses this pattern; the book is frankly presented as a collection of political essays, with any fictional element confined to the footnotes. These essays return to the themes of BARBARIANS -- democracy and the nature of the state -- but now with specific reference to contemporary events such as waterboarding and Guantanamo. The story, such as it is, unspools in two separate bands of footnotes lower down on the page. One concerns the relationship between Coetzee and Anya, the woman (youngish, highly sexed) who is typing the manuscript for him; the other is a parallel narrative told by the typist, including her own relationship with her partner in the upstairs apartment. The theme of an older man's attraction to a young woman is also familiar from other Coetzee books, but I have to say that this particular example is rather uninvolving. The author never really gives Anya a distinctive voice -- though I am not sure that this is important to him.

Coetzee himself characterizes what the critics say of his recent work: "At heart he is not really a novelist at all, they say, but a pedant who dabbles in fiction." There is some truth in this, and he knows it. But that does not make the book dull. For one thing, as we know from his collection INNER WORKINGS, Coetzee is a superb essayist, and never boring. For another, the layout of the book in three parallel tracks makes for a very interesting dynamic in reading. Although the book is constructed in short chapters, the three strands seldom pause at the same time; there is always at least one thread pulling you forward. You find yourself changing your ways of reading, sometimes going down each page vertically in the usual way, sometimes reading one of the bands across several pages before going back to catch up on the others. And then you begin to find references from one of the levels recurring on another one many pages later; the three layers get out of synch, creating a fascinating pattern of past, present, and possibly future -- if a writer at the end of his creative life (as he sees himself) can be said to have a future.

This, I believe, is what concerns Coetzee most. The book reads as two drafts of a final testament written after a lifetime of thought. The first part (two thirds of the whole), entitled "Strong Opinions," supposedly consists of a manuscript the novelist is preparing for a German publisher, obiter dicta from a Nobel Prize guru. Hard-hitting thoughts, to be sure, but as Anya gradually makes him realize, they are also somewhat impersonal. In the final third, he starts a private diary, written for himself alone (though shared with Anya); these entries deal with emotions, dreams, the process of writing, music, and the afterlife. Does the novelist leave more to later generations by posing as a sage, or by constructing a fiction out of his inmost thoughts? He leaves us in no doubt that this is a construction. The further on we get in the story, the more we become aware of the author at work, contriving what we read. Of course Anya is not a real character; she is meant to be seen as an invention of the author's, a stalking horse, an implied critic, and an object of his erotic fantasy. The transparency is pathetic, really -- a kind of mental masturbation -- but it also lets us see much deeper inside the heart of this aging man than all the assurance of his opening polemic could ever do.