Distinguished Disabilities

...Henry was a negligible person, a freeloader with no real job, who seemed to have accomplished nothing in over 50 years, and yet somehow projected an ironic, negative attitude toward everything, including his beautiful and gifted wife...

...She passed on 12 years ago, but she still lives in him or with him, just as he has a mother who, at the times when she is not in or with him, awaits the angels' clarion from her plot in the cemetery in Ballarat...

...All this proceeds in a fairly conventional way—too conventional for Coetzee, whose tales have often been compared with those of Kafka and Beckett...

...Coetzee himself emigrated to Australia in 2002...

...Worse, Elizabeth is an irritating character, with her vatic airs and ex cathedra pronouncements...

...One simply expects more, though this is utterly unfair...

...I would prefer a more interesting subject but am saddled with you, the onelegged man who cannot make up his mind...

...When did you last go for a walk under the starry sky...

...And what about selfishness...

...but after a certain age we have all lost a leg, more or less...

...For months Jane had been wonderful to Alan, and Alan had been grateful...

...How you and I became coupled," Elizabeth tells Paul, "God alone knows, for we were certainly not meant for each other...

...Paul desperately tries to rid himself of Elizabeth, but she has glommed firmly onto him...

...He was married once, certainly...

...What folly to be so alone in the world...

...She has escaped him, wholly escaped...

...She might not notice or sympathize with his pain and disability, but she also never treated him as an invalid, a member of a different, inferior species...

...The first nurse is a repellently cheerful woman named Sheena, who refers to the bedpan as the potty, his penis as his willie, and devotes a certain amount of time each day to what she calls SC—stump care...

...A thoughtful yet rather conventional woman, Jane is deeply invested in her own idea of herself as a virtuous human being...

...he becomes successful, even fashionable...

...As a lapsed Catholic, he remembers that a man's seed represents God's word, and sees himself now, fading away into old age, as the mere ghost of a man...

...He works with excitement...

...She is capable (and this is a rare feat) of writing novels of ideas whose characters do not function merely as personifications of certain positions or concepts but exist as individuals in their own right...

...Where they were once lovers, partners, they are now reduced to "caregiver and caregetter," resentful in their roles...

...What are their limitations...

...When I am with you I am at home," she informs him...

...How she managed the trick he has yet to grasp, but it is so: She has escaped into a life of her own...

...Though Lurie is now nearing 80, her skill and penetration show no signs of slackening...

...Who is real, Paul or Elizabeth...

...he sells his art to a dealer Delia has set him up with...

...Are they his family, the three of them...

...It is the old curse of the Nobel...

...It is, in fact, her major attraction for him...

...But now she was tired of being wonderful, and Alan, she suspected, was tired of being grateful...

...Her self-sacrifice, however, does not seem to achieve much...

...He expresses a fleeting interest in a woman he sees briefly in an elevator: Elizabeth informs him that her name is Marianna (!) and arranges a sexual encounter between them and an opportunity for them to engage in postcoital philosophical conversations...

...But everything Coetzee writes is rewarding, and even the works that are less than successful are on a high level...

...Readers of Coetzee will recognize her as the protagonist of his previous book, an episodic, philosophical not-quite novel bearing the very title Elizabeth Costello...

...As Alan and Delia embark on their torrid and undignified affair, Henry and Jane fall seriously in love...

...Elizabeth begins visibly to manipulate Paul's actions...

...one cynical observer calls her "the intellectual's Dolly Parton...

...Although there is much that is wonderful in this book, it is on some fundamental level unsatisfactory...

...Both...

...Worse than miserly, in fact: unnatural...

...Be a main character...

...Her replacement is a self-possessed Croatian woman, in early middle age, named Marijana...

...As a migraine sufferer, she commandeers the most comfortable office and the most comfortable furniture from other people's offices...

...Live like a hero...

...24.95), also explores the effects of physical debility and pain, with rather different emphases and conclusions...

...When I am not with you I am homeless...

...Nobody says this, nobody is supposed to say it, but it is true...

...Alan is in pain...

...Alan himself views Henry with a mixture of jealousy and contempt: "He had never liked the idea that Delia was married to Henry Hull...

...The novel opens with a disturbing moment: Jane looks at her husband and literally does not recognize him...

...Paul is the aging man afraid of solitude and incipient mortality...

...Most of the Corinth community, though, is not so cynical, and soon nearly everyone, male and female, is madly in love with Delia and vying for her favors and attentions...

...In this smart little tale, Lurie raises fascinating questions about the nature of duty and virtue...

...Paul's return to consciousness is a painful matter...

...Without giving away the novel's ending, it is possible to say that most readers will re-examine their own ideas on these subjects, and in many cases reformulate them...

...A father too, doing his waiting farther away, in the cemetery in Pau, from where he rarely pays visits...

...The authorial point of view appears in fact to be split, sometimes uneasily, in two...

...At the same time Paul is only too aware of the prison constituted by the self, and the difficulty of escaping that self, "the creature trapped behind the glass whose stare we are normally so careful to avoid...

...It makes you tired and weak...

...Her 10 rather slim novels, over a career that spans more than four decades, are always elegant, intelligent and pleasingly controlled...

...Someone was getting out of a taxi, paying the driver, and then starting slowly down the long driveway: an aging man with slumped shoulders, a sunken chest, and a protruding belly, leaning on a cane___There was something about him that made her feel uneasy and a little frightened...

...When should one think of others, when of oneself...

...When does it stop being a vice (and there is no question that it is a vice—Delia chews people up and spits them out) and become a strength, even a necessity...

...Alan, a successful architectural historian with a tenured position at Corinth, led a charmed life until he was felled by a back injury about a year before the beginning of the action...

...He now realizes that he has always been an outsider, never quite at home either in Australia or in his native France, where people refer to him as "l'anglais...

...Who are his family...

...He had a gift once, but he wouldn't put it first, so he couldn't hold on to it," she remarks dismissively...

...Coming home every day from her administrative job at the university, she dedicates her evenings and weekends to cooking, shopping and caring for him...

...But here we are...

...She absolutely refuses to cook, clean, shop, or sew...

...Perhaps this is the point of the exercise...

...For the time being, at least, he requires home care...

...But why...

...The two well-worn topics of old age and the nature of artistic creation are perhaps, then, a little anticlimactic, though Coetzee's contributions here are frequently poetic and apt...

...To continue to produce fiction in the very different and relatively placid environment of Australia surely constitutes a major change for Coetzee, and it is natural that he should search about for a new subject...

...In her he begins to see if not beauty then at least the perfection of a certain feminine type"—that is, ripeness, fullness...

...The concept of virtue is far richer and more extensive than either Jane or Alan— or, possibly, we—might previously have been aware...

...It appears, moreover, that Paul has simply been a character in Elizabeth's imagination, raw material for a novel she is in the process of conceiving...

...Alan's character has changed for the worse, and so, it turns out, has hers...

...Become major, Paul...

...but when do they cease to be valuable and become destructive...

...it makes you depressed and anxious and fearful...

...If it is, or seems, formless, this is clearly because the author has chosen to make it so...

...You want to be with Marijana but are saddled with me instead...

...While riding his bicycle in the Australian city where he lives, he is hit by a car and injured so badly that his leg has to be amputated...

...I mean, don't you feel sometimes," she asks him, "when you lie there suffering, that images or messages are coming to you, ones you'd never find otherwise...

...he wants Marijana and her handsome family...

...He must act, she tells him, with a certain decision and abandon, "So that you may be worth putting in a book...

...While these people are frequently both foolish and ridiculous, she never loses her essential sympathy for them, or alienates ours...

...So what is the point of complaining...

...Coetzee's new novel, Slow Man (Viking, 265 pp...

...And it is true: Alan has begun to create paintings and sculptures, to consider himself, in effect, an artist...

...After spending some time with Slow Man, the thoughtful reader might come to see himself—or herself—as the object of some unknown, extended plot, and to view his or her life as symbols or symptoms, the way Elizabeth sees Paul's...

...Delia urges him to give his work priority over his marriage, to emulate her own selfishness, and she points to her husband, a poetturned-househusband, as a warning...

...he lies about, whining and snapping at his long-suffering wife...

...like its predecessor Elizabeth Costello, it sometimes seems more a series of philosophical thoughts and conundrums than a novel, and its formlessness is bothersome coming from so very accomplished a writer...

...Here we meet another couple in the process of unraveling, middle-aged Jane and Alan Mackenzie, who had spent 15 quite happy years together when they were suddenly faced with the unpleasant discovery that pain "is bad for the character, just as all misfortunes are: poverty and unemployment and loss of friends and family...

...Lurie, it should be mentioned, spent a number of years teaching English at Cornell...

...Now author and character are conversing, disagreeing, sparring...

...Elizabeth urges Paul to look outside himself again...

...Or neither...

...every novel that comes afterward is measured against that yardstick and almost inevitably found wanting...

...Then he begins to wonder, disconsolately, whether he is not himself merely a character in Marijana's story—or perhaps in Marianna's...

...Paul's imagination starts to mix the Jokic family's immigrant story with his own, for he himself, at age six, had emigrated to Australia...

...He has a sister...

...From this point on such moments become increasingly frequent...

...Clearly, she has to go...

...J.M...

...Delia is lushly gorgeous, with cascading tendrils of blond hair and a husky Southern accent...

...it is her duty, and it should surely be her pleasure, to minister to his needs...

...We can all, I think, agree that these qualities are valuable ones...

...As time passed, her virtue had failed...

...It is, indeed, her identity as a mother that attracts him, and it is her children, particularly her teenaged son Drago, that he covets...

...What is the right answer...

...Behold this being who eats with me, spends nights with me, says 'I' on my behalf...

...he thinks...

...It is not entirely surprising, therefore, when Paul's story takes an antirealist twist and a strange woman appears on his doorstep, an elderly novelist named Elizabeth Costello...

...His photograph collection of life in the early mining camps of Victoria and New South Wales, which he shares with Drago, becomes a way for them to join their own histories to that of their adopted country...

...What he can be altogether more definite about is that he has neither wife nor offspring...

...By the time the book starts he has turned from a fit, handsome man into a shuffling mess, and his character seems to have degenerated as badly as bis body...

...Of course we, and Jane, know better...

...Your missing leg is just a sign, or symbol or symptom, I can never remember which is which, of growing old, old and uninteresting...

...The wonderfully awful Delia is a great achievement, for Lurie makes us, despite Delia's really superhuman egotism and selfishness, rather admire her...

...Through each other, they come to understand and verbalize some of the basic discontents of the human condition...

...You have lost a leg, I know, and ambulating is no fun...

...There is not only the missing leg and the horrifying idea of a prosthesis—out of surrealism, Paul thinks, out of Dali—there is, in addition, the realization of just how solitary his life has become in recent years, something he had never paid much attention to...

...but the partner in that enterprise is no longer part of him...

...Jane, who as an administrator has to cater to Delia's capaciousness, finds that the charming author is always insisting on something special in the way of services or equipment...

...Paul falls, ridiculously, in love...

...With Truth and Consequences (Viking, 240 pp., $24.95), hernewnovel, she returns to the same Corinth University in upstate New York where the hapless spouses in her 1974 bestseller The War Between the Tates battled it out...

...Elizabeth is the perplexed artist, torn between various possibilities and ideas in her work, at the mercy, to a large extent, of the vagaries and eccentricities of characters who appear, like Paul, to have a life perfectly independent of her and her inventive faculties...

...One of the greatest writers to have come out of South Africa, he built his novels and his entire career on the geography, history and soul of that troubled country...

...As he broods on this failure of his, he begins to interpret it as more than folly: It amounts to a sort of egomania to go through life leaving no trace and no heir...

...This uneasy balance is disturbed when Corinth acquires a glamorous visiting professor, the famous writer Delia Delaney, author of Womenfaith (spiritual essays), Dreamworks (poetry) and Moon Tales (modern fairy stories...

...What could be more selfish, more miserly—this in specific is what gnaws at him—than dying childless, terminating the line, subtracting oneself from the great work of generation...

...Alan is so smitten with Delia that he finds her egotism, which infuriates Jane and emasculates and enslaves Henry, strangely liberating...

...That is what the classics teach us...

...That isn't Alan Mackenzie," Jane would think, "it's some pale, fat, weak, greedy, demanding person...

...Otherwise what is life for...

...Coetzee's description of the accident and subsequent surgery, seen from Paul's skewed, feverish point of view, is brilliant—but one expects no less from this author, winner of the Nobel and of not just one but two Booker Prizes, an unprecedented accomplishment...

...she leaves those banal necessities to her husband, Henry Hull, a pleasant and attractive man whose entire role in life has been reduced to taking care of the whims and needs of this self-centered goddess...

...She even tells him that his pain might serve some purpose...

...His protagonist, Paul Rayment, is 60 years old, prematurely elderly both in body and spirit...

...But Paul does not want philosophical conversations...

...Henry works like a slave, and he is both kind and wise...