The Slow Man

The latest novel by J.M. Coetzee has been creamed by the last couple of reviewers I've read, so I thought I'd weigh in briefly to say that it is quite a good novel, a great novel, actually, that continues in the same metafictional spirit that characterized his last book, Elizabeth Costello. Elizabeth Costello, in fact, is an important character in this novel as well, though not the most important. That distinction belongs to Paul Rayment, an Australian in his mid-sixties who at the beginning of the story is hit by a car while bicycling along Magdill road in Adelaide, and then suffers the loss of a leg on the operating table.

His reaction is understandably bitter, a bitterness which is brought to life by his dismissal of a number of caretakers, the companionship of a lady friend, and even the prosthesic leg that would give him something approaching the mobility he had before. His world lightens only with his growing awareness of the vitality of his nurse, Marijana Jokic, a Croatian immigrant who brings her youngest daughter and a number of malaprops with every blessed visit. Just when he is beginning to appear settled in his newfound infatuation, along comes Elizabeth, whom he has never met, but who is strangely aware of even the most minor details of his case. And more than that, as the lady novelist recites for Paul and for us readers the first lines of Slow Man itself.

What, exactly, is achieved with this structural arrangement, in which a fictional author is granted her limited omniscient perspective, but is also improbably forced (or perhaps she just as improbably chooses) to sleep on benches in a nearby park? Is she a stand-in for Coetzee? Sometimes it seems so, as when she speaks the first lines of the novel, but sometimes it's something more and sometimes it is something less. Perhaps it's part of a rather elaborate joke, as the Croatian surname of Paul's nurse so obviously signals. It is a joke that Paul himself seems reluctantly all too aware of. It also affords the author (authors, rather - Coetzee and Costello) of sincerely exploring the fictional space we inhabit for some 250 odd pages, as well as the metafictional space that works like a kind of wormhole within it. Metaphysics, I sometimes think, can help us resist the temptations of sentimentality and renew our sense of comedy. I wonder whether something similar can be achieved in storytelling with the metafictional technique. Consider the following passage:

'Am I to infer,' he says to her on the Sunday evening, 'that you have come knocking on my door in order to study me so that you can use me in a book?'

She smiles. 'Would that it were so simple, Mr Rayment.'

'Why is it not simple? It sounds simple enough to me. Are you writing a book and putting me in it? Is that what you are doing? If so, what sort of book is it, and don't you think you need my consent first?'

She sighs. "If I were going to put you in a book, as you phrase it, I would simply do so. I would change your name and one or two of the circumstances of your life, to get around the law of libel, and that would be that.'

In fact, Paul sees her work-in-progress on his coffee table and realizes it must be a biography or some sort of documentary. Perhaps a novelization. In a rush of dramatic irony, we as readers are made aware of the fact that Costello knows not just the story of Paul, but the very novel we have in our hands. The lives of writers and the lives of their characters are inextricably intertwined. Costello may be a stand-in for Coetzee, but if that seems to fit we must also acknowledge that Paul seems a pretty good match for the author as well (he's a man, for one thing); maybe even a better one. In the exchange above (and elsewhere in the novel as well) we learn through Elizabeth that literary creation isn't all that simple. With Paul we can learn that however bitterly we may choose to regard our plight, the ongoing story of our lives will always offer new surprises. Could it be otherwise? Maybe. But it isn't here. There are always choices to make, by author and by character, and that is part of what makes the story so true.

Obvious, maybe; great fun definitely. Moreover, this fun, all this joking around, is rather casually connected to purpose. Or much of it is; sometimes, as Elizabeth says, a joke is just a joke. There are plenty of other instances in which the joke allows us to watch Paul in more dire straits: there are scenes of humiliation, scenes of lyrical outburst, scenes of great existential angst. Perhaps not all of these are necessarily anchored by the double fold of fiction, but after the Death of the Author, and maybe the Death of the Death of the Author, Coetzee's latest work strikes me as a very fine road to travel on. Profoundly enjoyable.