December 31, 2007
J. M. Coetzee: A brief comment and several reviews
(Photograph by Tony Cenicola for the New York Times)
I have just completed the last book I will read this year: J.M. Coetzee’s new novel, Diary of a Bad Year. Each review of the book has of course discussed its three-stream or three-band structure. The first stream, at the top of the page, presents a series of brief, sharp essays by a character only minimally different in biographical detail from Coetzee himself; they reflect on politics, ethics, and many other aspects of contemporary life. Beneath that, separated by a thin black line, is an interior monologue created by that character during the essays’ composition. Beneath another black line that begins twenty-five pages in, the reader encounters the thoughts of Anya, a young woman the Coetzee doppelgänger hires to type the essays printed at the top of the page. Several reviewers have noted that readers can choose whether to read the three streams simultaneously or consecutively. But, having read them simultaneously, the extreme control Coetzee exerts over this potentially unwieldy configuration gives reading them simultaneously a richness that I cannot imagine would come forth if read the other way.
At the outset of the novel, Coetzee and the book’s designer have arranged the text such that no sentence runs from one page to the next, thus giving the reader a natural pause with which to skip down to the next stream; only after forty-two pages does a sentence run across the gutter, causing one to read ahead with one narrative and then circle back to catch up on the next. By this point, all three streams have been introduced and the reader is relatively comfortable with how the pages are divided. Only then does Coetzee begin to push and pull the structure. Roughly halfway through the novel, the streams begin diverging fairly sharply in pace and tone, giving the story as a whole a fascinating kind of elasticity; on page 107, the third stream—recording dialogue between Anya and her boyfriend, Alan—not only fits with what came before it on page 106, but might also be seen to offer a comment on the stream just above it. Later still, Coetzee presses further, introducing a temporal malleability in which the streams no longer march in lock step, but lag behind and pass each other like runners in a race. The three tales remain bound together in the reader’s mind, and feeling the tension this generates offers a pleasure that conventionally structured novels, in which one can easily discern flashbacks and the like, rarely convey.
There is much to be said about the book, but aside from this comment on structure I leave it to professionals. Here are links to reviews by James Wood in the New Yorker, Judith Shulevitz in Slate, Hilary Mantel in the New York Review of Books, and Kathryn Harrison in the New York Times Book Review.
Coincidentally, when I read books I often make notations in the margin, and I was surprised to discover that the spread depicted above, in a photograph that accompanied Harrison’s review, was one I marked as being particularly important (I placed an asterisk next to the second stream). Did an editor purposefully choose a potentially important spread to reveal, or is this mere coincidence?
UPDATE, 01/01: Richard Eder reviews the novel in today’s New York Times. He picks up on another aspect of the interplay between the streams that I neglected to mention: As Anya becomes more fully embodied as a character, C.’s short essays dwindle in power (and length, as if he were losing his ability to concentrate).
And from here on, the pages divide: the top third, C.’s philosophical opinions; the middle third, his account of Anya, as well as his feelings; the bottom third, her account of C., as well as hers. Gradually the last two parts grow more vivid, while the opinions grow dustier. Anya expands into her reality; C. deflates, magnificently, into his.
UPDATE, 01/02: The Village Voice publishes a review of the novel by Allen Barra.
UPDATE, 01/04: Art Winslow reviews the book in the Los Angeles Times.
UPDATE, 01/07: Adam Begley reviews the novel in the New York Observer.
UPDATE, 01/10: Amelia Atlas reviews the book for the Barnes & Noble Review.