Without joie de vivre

J M Coetzee's latest novel, Slow Man, reveals a man who appears without joy, yet the book is beautifully composed, deeply thought and wonderfully written. By Ward Just

J M Coetzee's signature work – Waiting for the Barbarians, The Master of Petersburg, Disgrace, among others – has a tremendous austerity. Think of a Romanesque church in the late afternoon of a wintry November day, shadows in the corners, echoes in the choir, communicants here and there, a divine providence implied but absent. Doubt prevails. The question might be: what is it to be human? And what is it that conspires against us? What prevents us from grasping that which can be grasped, even if it's only a single hour free of distress? There is no consolation in this church, or in the graveyard that adjoins it. It's a common complaint that Coetzee's ministry can seem cold, abstract, willfully unforgiving. Formality has that aspect. But I think of his work as cold only in the sense of exact. Cold facts, cold numbers, cold dawn. Not heat, light. His books are as reliable as a plumb line.
Now comes Slow Man, visible Coetzee from the very first sentence – but this time I think I hear a banjo in the choir.
The slow man is Paul Rayment, 60 years old, a retired photographer and archivist, divorced and childless, living alone. The venue is Adelaide, Australia. He's out for a ride on his bicycle when he's struck by a car he doesn't see. “The blow catches him from the right, sharp and surprising and painful, like a bolt of electricity, lifting him off the bicycle.” He flies through the air, telling himself to relax, striking the pavement and commencing to skid. The skidding seems to go on forever, and when it's done he feels himself at peace, slack of body. He hears rather than feels his skull bounce on the pavement. He notices that the day is glorious: bright sun, benign temperature, a good time for a nap. When he awakens he finds his body no longer slack but thick, “ponderous.” His first worry is his bicycle, since bicycles can be stolen; and then he faints. JM Coetzee's sentences are immaculate, and in a page and a half the scene, and some sense of what is to come, is set as firmly as a stake in the heart.
In an ambulance on the way to the hospital, Rayment is disoriented. What is happening to him? He hears voices and then, weirdly, the clack of a typewriter. This is his imagination at work, a message that seems to be written on the screen of his own inner eyelid. “ERTY, say the letters, then F-R-I-V-0-L, then a trembling, then E, then Q-W-E-R-T-Y, on and on.” Gripped by panic, he is given a needle and awakens “in a cocoon of dead air.” At the hospital, the news is not good. His knee is mangled and his leg must come off, though of course the surgeons will try to save as much of it as they can. If he were a younger man, they might attempt a reconstruction. But he is not a young man. He is 60, so what's the point?
The operation is successful, and Rayment must now endure the aftermath: the pain, the boredom, the washing, the catheter, the determined good cheer of the nurses, the surgeon's frank admiration of his own handiwork. This is not an admiration the patient can share; he did not give his consent. Before long a “difficult word” is added to his vocabulary: “prosthesis.” With a prosthesis, he will be up and around in no time at all, perhaps even riding his bicycle again. He is told that wonderful progress has been made with prosthetic devices, really superb – and this news is unwelcome. Peevish, unsettled, appalled and in pain, Rayment wants no part of a prosthesis. Neither is he amused by his nurse's puzzlement – amazement, almost – at his family status. That is to say, he has no family. His parents are dead, his wife gone. He protests that he has friends, good close friends, but these do seem to be few in number. One comes to the hospital for a visit and later turns up at his apartment thinking about sex; and then she leaves and that is all we see of the friends.
Certainly Rayment will need rehabilitation, and that inspires yet another question. Would his insurance stretch to “frail care?” No, it would not. “Well then,” the social worker says, “you'll have to budget for it, won't you?””
Rayment remains in the hospital for days, with plenty of time to reflect on the absence of his leg, and time also to search for the meaning of the imaginary typewriter and the truncated message. “Frivolous is not a bad word to sum him up, as he was before the event and may still be. If in the course of a lifetime he has done no significant harm, he has done no good either. He will leave no trace behind, not even an heir to carry on his name. Sliding through the world: that is how, in a bygone age, they used to designate lives like his: looking after his interests, quietly prospering, attracting no attention. If none is left who will pronounce judgment on such a life, if the Great Judge of all has given up judging and withdrawn to pare his nails, then he will pronounce it himself: a wasted chance.” Rayment in a nutshell.
Home again at last, he engages a nurse skilled in “frail care”. She is Marijana Jokic, a Croatian who learned her nursing skills in Germany. Rayment does not find her attractive, but she is very good with his leg stump, which he has taken to calling le jambon. Competence trumps beauty. Marijana is attentive when he wants her to be and absent when he wants to be alone. She does the shopping, the cooking, the washing, and when she smokes she is courteous enough to retreat to the balcony. But it is her care of le jambon and its “obscenely curtailed thigh muscles” that endears her to her patient, and soon enough Rayment has revised his estimate of her appearance: “more than not unattractive, she is on occasion a positively handsome woman, well built, sturdy, with nut-brown hair, dark eyes, a complexion olive rather than sallow; a woman who carries herself well, shoulders squared, breasts thrust forward. Prideful, he thinks.”
So Paul Rayment, diminished in body, weak of spirit, disconsolate, worried by what he believes has been a wasted life, falls for his Croatian in a way that seems, in its opening moves, almost chaste. After all, she is a married woman. She has children. Rayment would not like to think of himself as a home wrecker and so, after he is rebuffed, he conceives of unusual arrangements. The Jokic family could come live with him. He could live with them. He has money, anything is possible, including a kind of godfather status to Marijana's son, Drago.
But these events take place long after the advent of the ominous Elizabeth Costello, world famous novelist and world class pain in the neck – or if not world class, at least seeded in the Southern Hemisphere. Still, she is not to be discounted: formidably intelligent, erudite and humorous. And so I am surely out of line when I think of her as a cross between Madame Blavatsky and Mrs Portnoy. My sympathies lie with one legged Paul.
Elizabeth Costello – she is the heroine of Coetzee's previous novel, Elizabeth Costello, in which she seems to know everything about almost everything – has nominated herself to force Paul Rayment to take charge of his life, to act. She arrives at his apartment unbidden. They have never met. You came to me, she explains. “In certain respects I am not in command of what comes to me” – and this includes the very words Rayment used in describing his accident.
Elizabeth Costello is a great advice giver: advice on conduct, children, language, apartment furnishings (Rayment's resembles “a Bavarian funeral parlour”), his relations with Marijana and the likely consequences if he declines to press the matter, and much else besides. Her justification for insinuating herself into Rayment's life: “I have been haunted by the idea of doing good.” Rayment, for his part, thinks her a liar and fabulator and that she is in his life for one reason and one reason only. She wants him as a character for one of her wretched novels. But this seems not to be the case, and at last she lays her cards on the table:
“Do you think what I have said is the worst that can be said of you – that you are as slow as a tortoise and fastidious to a fault? There is much beyond that, believe me. What do we call it when someone knows the worst about us, the worst and most wounding, and does not come out with it but on the contrary suppresses it and continues to smile on us and make little jokes? We call it affection. Where else in the world, at this late stage, are you going to find affection, you ugly old man? Yes, I am familiar with that word too, ugly. We are both of us ugly, Paul, old and ugly. As much as ever would we like to hold in our arms the beauty of all the world. It never wanes in us, that yearning. But the beauty of the world does not want any of us. So we have to make do with less, a great deal less. In fact, we have to accept what is on offer or else go hungry. So when a kindly godmother offers to whisk us away from our dreary surroundings, from our hopeless, our pathetic, unrealisable dreams, we ought to think twice about spurning her.”
Thus the ominous Elizabeth Costello's – I suppose the word would be “settlement.” She gives Rayment 24 hours to decide whether to accept what's on offer. The answer is on the last page of the book.
I take this novel to be a scrutiny of disappointment and irresolution, a chicken and egg affair that does not yield satisfactory answers. Still, Coetzee's narrative is a bracing corrective to the blustering do-not-go-gentle-into-that-good-night. For Rayment, one chance after another has come and gone, some seized, most not. And when enough chances have come and gone, it can seem altogether wiser to maintain things as they are. Romantic leaps of faith are for the young. Rayment's heart is “in hiding.” JM Coetzee has much to say about these matters and many others in Slow Man – beautifully composed, deeply thought, wonderfully written.
© The New York Times
Ward Just's most recent novel, An Unfinished Season, was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize.