Staff Review: J.M. Coetzee’s SUMMERTIME

J.M. Coetzee is messing with my mind! In his newest installment of what some people are calling his memoirs, Johnny dealt us another heavy blow of tongue-in-cheek mind tricks. Is this all one big practical joke? What am I supposed to do when the world’s most critically acclaimed author is making fun of me like I’m back in third grade and I have my pants on backwards? Where is the complaint department for that?

Summertime is the story of a young academic who has decided to write a biography of the late writer, John Coetzee. Centering on Coetzee in his thirties, the book looks back on the pivotal time period between 1972 and 1977. A time in which Coetzee honed the duality of cold subtlety and childish romance that have marked his matter of fact tragedies and psychological thrillers and made him loved and hated in a way that no other writer, save Norman Mailer, has ever been. The middling and overmatched academic who Coetzee invents does a series of interviews with people who were only tangentially important to Coetzee. Interviewee’s revelations include a tawdry affair with a married woman, a creepy imaginary love affair with a Brazilian dancer, a sad, but sexually charged, off putting night with his first cousin. Odd, distant satellites are chosen ahead of closer, more intimate, better-qualified choices for interviews. The unflattering picture they give of their friend and stranger is of a socially awkward half-man that hides in books, and who would never succeed at life, but might turn out to be a pretty good writer. It completes the three part of an odd memoir type thing that includes Boyhood and Youth.

What’s driving me nuts is the circularity of the whole thing. Coetzee is a famous hermit, so why does he write his memoirs to begin with? Surely there are hundreds of young academics foaming at the mouth to get the chance to write about the worthy Nobel Prize recipient, are they so predictable and boring to Coetzee that he chooses to invent a stock academic? He not only writes his own memoir, but he does so in a Meta fashion that satirizes the whole concept of biography. His memoir, much like his latest novel Diary of a Bad Year, starts as something serious, but delves into gossip and scandal. He’s a serious novelist and knows we want serious books from him, but he keeps hooking us with substance and switching it for fluff. Infuriating, but what’s got me ready to challenge him to pistols at dawn is that I love it. In fact, I’m addicted to the fluff. I can’t turn my eyes away. Coetzee knows that I act like I want to come at his novels with a hammer and a chisel, but he’s telling me that, truthfully, I want to read them with hot buttered popcorn. Cruel truth.

We invent the celebrities we want, and Coetzee is every bit the literary celebrity. In his memoirs he has rejected the conventions of that deal. He’ll invent those who invent him, which leaves voyeurs like me with a conundrum when trying to puzzle together his life. If I’m going to try to learn as much about him as I can, then build my model home version of my hero in the most useful way (for me) I can, how do I cope with such loose sand as the base of that structure. Coetzee’s Summertime is brilliant because, although it seems self-deprecating and humbling for the author, it really pokes fun at the readers who want more from novelists than good, solid fiction. Short-listed for the Booker prize, this book should make your short list of things to read in 2010.

–Brian Contine