The critic and the novelist

Novelists do not always make the best critics, and vice versa. But there are writers — Henry James, Virginia Woolf and John Updike spring to mind — who are similarly gifted in both fields. Such cases are interesting because of the questions they raise about the relationship between the novels and the criticism. How similar are the two stylistically? Can the judgments of the critic ever be independent of the inclinations of the novelist? (Or, to put it another way, are writers likely to favour those novelists who most resemble themselves?) Trickier still is the question of truthfulness: which, out of the fiction or the criticism, can best be said to represent the real author? Fiction’s domain is the imagination, whereas criticism deals with facts. But despite its basic falsity, fiction at its best reveals a kind of truth that will always be inaccessible to the critic.

All these questions are prompted by this fascinating collection of essays by the Nobel Prize-winning South African novelist J. M. Coetzee. Written mainly for the New York Review of Books, the pieces here range from overviews of relatively minor early 20th-century European writers (Robert Walser, Sándor Márai) to reviews of individual works by living novelists (Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, V. S. Naipaul’s Half a Life). As a young man Coetzee worked as a computer programmer (an experience he describes in his autobiographical novel Youth), and subsequently combined writing fiction with a career as an English professor. The essays in this volume show these influences: restrained in tone and only cautiously speculative, they proceed with a dogged, patient logic that is singular to this author.