Summertime by J. M. Coetzee An Early Review

Coetzee’s new novel, Summertime, is short-listed for the Mann Booker. The winner will be announced on October 6th. If JMC wins, he’ll be the first writer in the history of the prize to win three times. The novel will be on-sale in the U.S. on December 24th unless, due to mounting excitement, Penguin USA is able to advance the date.

I have to say that this is one of the most remarkably constructed novels that I have ever read. The form seems unique and the content, it being Coetzee, is fastidious. Epistolary novels have been around since the dawn of the modern novel and in recent years we have had novels composed of emails. But I have never come across a novel whose text consists of a set of interviews…bracketed by fragmentary journal extracts. It’s sort of Citizen Kane-like but the subject isn’t John Foster Kane; it’s John Coetzee.

There are five, generously-scaled interviews; each named after the “A” in the Q and A. Four out of the five are women who have encountered the fictional JMC, some intimately. In an extraordinary stylistic move, the second interview reverses figure and ground. The interviewer recaps the interview for Margot, who has been questioned, while she reacts to how the interview turned out. So many brilliant moves: the text specifies “silence” in brackets where a question is portentiously not answered. The A’s, at key points, keep requesting that material be taken out of the interviews and assured that the offending passages will be softened or removed. But they never are, apparently. Hell…we are reading them.

Most Americans, including Oprah Winfrey, have trouble with the idea that a memoir could be considered a form of literature. How salutary an effect for these misguided readers to have a sort-of-novel, sort-of-memoir, told in the form of made-up interviews in which the writer is apparently being asked about himself.

But as much as you may want to puzzle about the “true” Coetzee behind this spark-inducing brilliance, it’s the women in this novel, revealing their hearts by talking about JC’s, that moved me towards a deep emotional attachment to the book. This figurative Coetzee is emotionally autistic. He’s not all there…and this throws “his women” into relief as if they were projecting their profiles onto a neutrally hued Robert Ryman canvas.

As for the John Coetzee of the story, he has a sad and obsessive relationship to his doddering father; perhaps as compensation for the other relationships that he doesn’t have. And see the section where Adriana, the third woman, explains why John can’t dance.

If I wanted to give myself some cover for confessing some very sensitive truths, I might try to hide those truths in a forest of fictions. See, I’m going lie dozens of times. But I’ll slip in some deep secrets of the self among all the tall tales. That’s the way I think Summertime works.

Sophie, a French academic and the last of the interviewed women to make an appearance in Summertime, calls JC a francophile so I’ll conclude with a reference to Montaigne, another self-revealing writer who I am always reading.

In order to grasp what I was feeling about Summertime, I imagined Montaigne walking through the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles which, of course, was after his time. I imagined that he walked straight into the mirrors and shattered them. As he picked up the pieces he saw reflected fragments of himself and he laughed. I think we are seeing fragments of Coetzee in Summertime and I think the writer is offering us some very serious laughter.

Montaigne said in the introduction to his Essays that if he could appear naked to his readers, if that were allowed by his society, then he would. He wanted to be that candid. I think that the good JMC appears to us naked in Summertime. But to see that nakedness, you have to know how to read.

-DH

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