Novelists, Martin Amis once wrote, are at their best in middle age. "They come good at 30, they peak at 50… at 70, novelists are ready to be kicked upstairs." But the creative arc is less predictable than this. Some novelists—Amis is an example—produce their best work before the bloom of youth has quite faded; others retain their powers until late in life. Two novelists who have been ageing well recently are Philip Roth (born 1933) and JM Coetzee (born 1940), both of whom have new books out this autumn. Aside from similarly well-stuffed prize cabinets, the two aren't often seen as having much in common. Partly, this is a matter of geography. When Roth gets compared with other writers, it is with his American contemporaries: Bellow, DeLillo, Mailer, Updike. When Coetzee gets compared with anyone (other than Beckett and Kafka), it tends to be with Nadine Gordimer, and the comparison isn't always favourable: she is seen as the white South African novelist who confronted apartheid, he as the one who avoided it. But Roth and Coetzee have more in common than is often realised. They are equally stubborn and intolerant of fools. Both have hard visions of life and, though liberal in outlook, are sceptical about the possibility of social or political progress. Moreover, the paths of their fiction seem to be converging. Their latest novels, certainly, are strikingly alike.
We should start, though, with the differences. The most obvious is style. To put it crudely: Roth writes in very long sentences, and Coetzee writes in very short ones. Words pour out of Roth. Reading him, one senses that he has almost too much to say. The frantic, frenzied quality of his prose results, in part, from the feeling that sentences are inadequate to the task of accommodating all that is in his head. And so, in much of his writing, he stretches them to their limit by layering closely related thought upon closely related thought, sub-clause upon sub-clause. The unusual thing about Roth's writing—perhaps its defining feature—is that while his sentences are extremely long, they are also extremely taut. As James Wood once put it, his prose is "fibrous." Not a word gets wasted.
Coetzee doesn't waste words either, but the feeling that his prose inspires is very different. Whereas with Roth one senses an almost limitless fecundity being compressed and moulded by the act of writing, with Coetzee one senses an underlying barrenness that only the labour of writing can force into life. Words do not pour out of Coetzee—they emerge grudgingly, like the trickle of an almost dried-up stream. Images of dogged, effortful coming to fruition appear frequently in his work. For example, in Life & Times of Michael K (the first of Coetzee's two Booker prize-winning novels), Michael K, alone in the desert, patiently tends his pumpkin seeds. When they finally grow, Michael K—not a man inclined to strong emotions—is overcome by gratitude: "He chewed with tears of joy in his eyes. The best, he thought, the very best pumpkin I have tasted." Similarly with Coetzee's prose, you are aware of how much labour has gone into its production, of how much resistance has been overcome.
Both Roth and Coetzee guard their personal lives closely, but the available evidence suggests that their personalities match their writing styles. Roth is garrulous and opinionated, something of a stand-up performer. Coeztee is famously taciturn. At the University of Cape Town, where he taught for many years, he was known as someone you didn't want to run into in the corridor. There are rumours of dinner parties at which he failed to utter a single word. It is tempting to imagine Roth and Coetzee having dinner together. Roth, you feel, would keep up a steady flow of impersonations, rants and dirty jokes. Coetzee, a thin smile on his lips, would respond mostly with polite nods—just occasionally breaking his silence to proffer some gnomic comment.
The second important difference between Roth and Coetzee has to do with humour. Throughout his career, Roth has been labelled a "comic genius." These words have never been applied to Coetzee. Roth's humour is all of a type. Its target is Jewish propriety—or rather, the offences against it that his characters commit. In Roth's first novel, Goodbye Columbus (1959), the narrator embarks on an affair with a young woman from a richer family and disgraces himself—and her—when her parents discover that they have been having sex. The novel set the template that Roth has followed in all his subsequent comic writing, although the transgressions of his protagonists soon became far more shocking. But it is noticeable, given what a savage writer he can be, that Roth's humour isn't at all savage. His strait-laced elders are never wholly ridiculous, and his narrators are always torn between doing the right and the wrong thing. You feel that part of him is shocked by what his narrators get up to—and that is why their getting up to it is so funny. One consequence is that Roth's humour can easily turn into something else. A slight shift of the light, and his haranguing parents become objects of fierce tenderness (as in his 1991 memoir, Patrimony), just as his wayward narrators can start to look like objects of self-loathing.
It is true that Roth can be outrageously funny—and equally true that Coetzee can be unremittingly bleak. But this contrast between their modes of writing shouldn't be overstated. For one thing, Roth has been getting less funny with age. His last seriously funny book was Sabbath's Theatre (1995). The three that followed—American Pastoral, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain (his so-called "American trilogy")—barely contained a laugh, and Everyman, his last novel, and Exit Ghost, his new one, are thoroughly depressing. In a recent interview, Mark Lawson suggested to Roth that he wasn't "happy with classification as a comic writer." Roth agreed. At the same time as Roth has been getting more serious, Coetzee has been introducing more humour into his work. It would be an exaggeration to describe any of his novels as comic, but nonetheless there is often humour present, albeit of a bone-dry kind. Coetzee's comedy, such as it is, generally has to do with sly self-mockery. It falls into two categories. Either he mocks his own moral failings or pretensions—notably in his autobiographical novel, Youth—or, more complicatedly, he mocks the reputation he has acquired as a certain kind of writer, one known for his inscrutability.
The last obvious difference between Roth and Coetzee has to do with their settings. Roth's are remarkably consistent: he returns again and again to the Weequahic neighbourhood of Newark, New Jersey, where he grew up. This is where almost all his protagonists come from (even if they now live elsewhere), and his novels usually contain lengthy descriptions of their childhoods. It is hard to overstate the importance to Roth of the Newark of the 1940s and 1950s—of the close-knit world of poor but aspirant Jewish families, with their codes of honour, their anxieties about antisemitism and their place within America, their desire for their sons and daughters to make good without abandoning their roots. This world is the source of all the conflicts and frictions in his novels. Coetzee's fiction, by contrast, represents a turning away from his roots. To judge from his two autobiographical novels, Boyhood and Youth, he associates his background (he is descended from Dutch immigrants) with shame of two kinds: that of being an unsophisticated provincial (in this respect he is like VS Naipaul), and that of being a white—and therefore undeservedly privileged—South African. His protagonists tend to be isolated figures, often living in extreme conditions, cut off from all support. When family relations enter his work, they are more likely to be sources of humiliation than comfort.
Yet this difference, too, shouldn't be overstated, because the two novelists' settings have grown less dissimilar with time. As Roth has aged, his characters have become more isolated. One thinks of Nathan Zuckerman (the narrator of nine Roth novels) living—as Roth has for the past decade—alone in the Connecticut countryside, or of the hero of Everyman, looking back on his life from his retirement community. Coetzee's fiction, meanwhile, has become more grounded in the real world. Early in his career, his novels were either historical, or were set in bleak imaginative landscapes. These days, his characters are still isolated, but they do at least live in the here and now. These shifts in the two writers' work have come about largely as a result of their focuses converging on the same subject: old age, and its woes. The prospect of oblivion has sharpened their imaginations, and given a kind of second life to their work.
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So much for the differences—real or illusory—between Roth and Coetzee. What of the similarities? The first to consider is honesty. There is a fearless, unflinching quality to both writers' prose, a sense that nothing is too shocking or brutal to be faced. Roth's honesty takes the form, most famously, of sexual frankness. His sex scenes are utterly lacking in decorum; they are ferociously, almost ecstatically filthy, and all the more shocking because they irrupt into his novels unannounced. One moment, a Roth novel looks like a fairly conventional family drama—the next it is all X-rated action, replete with cocks and arseholes and cunts. Except Roth is no pornographer. His logic is simply that this is what people are like: their heads tend to be indecent places, and it would be wrong to pretend otherwise.
Coetzee's honesty has a bleaker, more existential tinge. His fiction has often involved taking his characters away from civilisation. It is in the extremes of behaviour that people reveal their natures—and so it is the writer's duty to seek out those extremes. But this also explains why Coetzee's settings have become less out of the way with time. Increasingly, age is doing the job that his pitiless landscapes used to do for him. Life, in a sense, has come to resemble his imagination. This points to an important divergence in the roles of sex and death in the two novelists' work. For Roth, sex has always been the great counterpoint to normality, the place where men and women escape their everyday selves. More recently, death has performed a similar role—it is what wrenches us from life. In Coetzee's novels, sex is not a counterpoint but of a piece with everything else—mechanical, joyless, essentially meaningless. And death, too, is not a wrench so much as the ultimate confirmation of futility. Both writers are often characterised as nihilists, but Coetzee's nihilism is purer than Roth's. Roth may not believe in much, but he believes passionately in some things: in sex, in family, in the essential interestingness of life. Coetzee believes in very little at all, apart from a certain, strange idea of human dignity. As he once put it, in his elliptical way: "I am not a herald of community or anything else. I am someone who has intimations of freedom (as every chained prisoner has) and constructs representations of people slipping their chains and turning their faces to the light."
The second important similarity between Roth and Coetzee is their preoccupation with sexual relationships that are beyond the pale—especially adultery, but also, more recently, relationships between older men and younger women. Reviewing Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Memories of My Melancholy Whores in the New York Review of Books in 2006, Coetzee wrote that the aim of that novel, which features an affair between a 90-year-old man and a 14-year-old girl, "is a brave one: to speak on behalf of the desire of older men for underage girls, that is, to speak on behalf of paedophilia, or at least to show that paedophilia need not be a dead end for either lover or beloved." Neither Coetzee nor Roth quite speak on behalf of paedophilia, but there is in their work a belief in the possibility of sexual relationships between old men and young women, and a refusal to condemn such attachments. In Disgrace, when David Lurie is disciplined for seducing one of his students, he refuses to express regret, even though it costs him his job. A similar defiance is evident in the attitude of the philandering protagonist of Roth's Everyman. Both authors—Roth in particular—have been lambasted by feminist critics for their evident sympathy with male sexual misbehaviour. There is a point at which a healthy regard for a traditional idea of masculinity—and male virtues—can spill over into misogyny, and both writers have at times crossed it.
The final thing that connects Roth and Coetzee is their use of alter egos. Throughout his career, Roth has deployed a cast of characters in this role: David Kepesh, the "professor of desire"; the novelist Nathan Zuckerman; and "Philip Roth," who has narrated several of his novels. Coetzee's fiction is no less self-referential. Part of his first novel, Dusklands (1974), was narrated by a 18th-century Boer settler named Jacobus Coetzee. Boyhood and Youth describe the early life of a figure who appears to be their author—although it is unclear whether the books are meant as literal autobiographies. More recently, Coetzee's alter ego has been the distinguished South African novelist Elizabeth Costello. In his books, Costello travels around giving lectures on such subjects as evil and animal welfare, and turns up unannounced in novels that are apparently nothing to do with her. On occasions, the real Coetzee has delivered lectures in the person of Costello—thus taking the blurring of fact and fiction to bizarre extremes.
Such authorial games inevitably give rise to speculation about the overlap between the made-up life and the real one. Roth is always asked about this, and he always gives the same answer: his characters, even the ones called Philip Roth, must not be confused with him. Yet this is somewhat disingenuous, because Roth clearly encourages the identification. If he didn't mean Zuckerman to be taken as a version of himself, why is Zuckerman's year of birth 1933 rather than, say, 1934 or 1932? Perhaps the best way to approach both novelists' excursions into autofiction is not to try to ascertain what their intentions are, but to ask what might prompt them to do it. Novelists have to take inspiration where they can find it—and the obvious place to look is their own lives. But if those lives are defined by writing—and by all the complications that go with doing it successfully—then the matter becomes less straightforward. In placing versions of themselves at the heart their fiction, Roth and Coetzee are rather like rock stars who give up singing about love and instead start singing about the pressures of fame. There is nothing inherently wrong with their doing so. The only question to ask is: do they do it well?
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Many of the currents of Roth's and Coetzee's careers come together in their new novels, Exit Ghost and Diary of a Bad Year, which resemble each other to an uncanny extent. Both are, as reviewers have pointed out, some way short of being their best books; yet they are highly characteristic. In both, the protagonist is an old man living on his own, whose biography mirrors that of his creator. Roth's narrator is Nathan Zuckerman (his last outing, Roth says). Coetzee's main character is a writer called John Coetzee, who lives in Adelaide (as Coetzee now does), and whose novels include Waiting for the Barbarians—the name of one of the real Coetzee's novels.
In both books, the writer's solitude is interrupted by a chance encounter. Zuckerman, visiting New York for an operation which he hopes will cure his incontinence, comes across an ad for a house swap with a young writer couple. He meets them, and is entranced by the wife, Jamie (and, in particular, her breasts). He decides to go ahead with the house swap, though he doesn't have any real desire to live in New York: it is a pretext to see more of Jamie. In the laundry room of his apartment block, the Coetzee character runs into a young women called Anya. He offers her the job of typing up the manuscript he is working on, a series of reflections on the origins of political power and the state of the world. Again, this is a pretext: he is mesmerised by her "divine behind." In both stories, a younger man comes between the older man and the object of his desire. In Exit Ghost, this isn't Jamie's husband but an old boyfriend, Kliman. In Coetzee's novel, the young rival is Anya's boyfriend, Alan.
Diary of a Bad Year is written in a highly unconventional way. Each page contains two or more levels of text. The top one is a series of reflections on political theory and the state of the world—in other words, the book the Coetzee character is writing (and Anya is typing). The one below is Coetzee's diary, describing his friendship with Anya. These are joined, later, by other voices: Anya's descriptions of her encounters with Coetzee; interjections by Alan; and, finally, a series of direct addresses by Anya to Coetzee (are they letters, emails?) in which she admits to feeling more towards him than she was ever able to show. The form of Exit Ghost is more conventional, but it, too, is not without its meta-textual tricks. During his stay in New York, Zuckerman starts working on an imaginary dialogue, "He and She," which is reproduced in the novel. It takes the form of a conversation between himself and Jamie, in which she admits to finding him attractive and flirts with the idea of sleeping with him.
The two novels, then, conclude at almost identical points. Though in reality little has happened, a world is posited where something does—where some kind of relationship between the older man and the younger women occurs, or is at least desired. There are two ways of looking at this. The first is depressing: this is simply the fantasy of a sad old man with nothing but an imaginary affair to console him. The other is more positive: the fictional affairs that the two (fictional) writers create for themselves are evidence of the consoling powers of literature. But whichever you favour, it is hard to avoid feeling that with these novels, both Roth and Coetzee have reached some kind of end point. Throughout their careers, the challenges of art, and the travails of the artist, have run like threads through their fiction; and these, no less than their engagement with the external world, have been the sources of their inspiration. If Roth and Coetzee have indeed arrived at cul-de-sacs, it will be interesting to see how they extricate themselves from them.
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