Summertime - Most Innovative Novel of the Year...So Far

One imagines that there comes a time in any reputable novelist's life when he/she (mostly he) thinks that he can get away with anything. They can experiment with all those forms and conceits that a publisher would have refused to publish earlier in their lives. As a result, the public gets a few terrible prose works inflicted on them. Works that we're compelled to read because of the writer's reputation, but works which then leave a terrible taste in the mouth. I'm thinking late Philip Roth. Both 2008's Indignation and 2009's The Humbling were self-indulgent pieces about Roth-like characters that obsessed over death. Indignation is written from the perspective of a young man who dies during the Korean War. He is looking at his past and all the failures that resulted in him getting drafted. The Humbling's about an older actor who has lost his virility--in all senses of the word. Both novels are short, brutal, and gratuitous, basically warning the reader that death comes to us all.

This year, J.M. Coetzee, another well-respected, older writer, shows that a dead protagonist can be done well. His latest novel, Summertime, is the third in a trilogy of novels/memoirs about a character named J.M. Coetzee. This one covers his life as a young adult, before he has written his first book. The book's main innovation is that it takes place after Coetzee has died. Rather, it's told from the perspective of his biographer who goes around the world interviewing people who knew Coetzee in the 1970's. The book opens and closes with chapters of Coetzee's diary from the era. In between, it contains five interviews: His cousin Margot, 3 romantic interests, and an academic colleague.

Each interview sheds light on a different aspect of Coetzee's character. While some are more admiring of Coetzee than others, each humbles him. Margot tells us that Coetzee lacked the manliness she expected in South African men. Julia, a married woman with whom Coetzee had an affair, derides him for being emotionally out of touch while making love. Indeed, the running theme is that Coetzee is not a great man. His prose is perfectly tuned; each interviewee is given a unique voice, making all their pronouncements believable.

At the same time, Coetzee's mere ordinariness makes his writing accomplishments that much greater. It leaves the reader wondering how the socially awkward thirty year old became a Nobel prize winner. Unfortunately, Summertime is supposed to be the last of the trilogy, but I would have been happy to read more.