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BOYHOOD:
scenes from a
provincial life - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BY J.M. COETZEE | VIKING | NONFICTION | 166 PAGES ____________________ BY ANDREW O'HEHIR | J.M. Coetzee has written that South African literature is precisely what you would expect from people living in prison. On one level this is obviously a condemnation of his country, burdened by many bitter years of isolation, self-hatred and deep internal divisions. But it is also a revealing comment about himself from the man whose grimly allegorical novels -- most notably "Waiting for the Barbarians" and the Booker Prize-winning "Life & Times of Michael K" -- have marked him as the most original figure among white South African writers. With the publication of "Boyhood," an oblique, almost strangled account of the author's upbringing in a struggling middle-class family during the postwar years, we at last learn something about the prison that the notoriously private Coetzee has himself inhabited. In the hands of an ordinary writer, this material might have become routine autobiography: drab suburban houses; an alcoholic, distant father, his business career decaying; an overly intimate, long-suffering mother; a mysterious cadre of dying older relatives, their roots in the pre-industrial countryside. It is the story of millions of 20th century families everywhere in the developed world. But it will not surprise readers of Coetzee's fiction to learn that the story of "Boyhood" is primarily internal, the story of an exquisitely painful -- almost autistic -- self-consciousness, a subjectivity so tender that it seems like "a crab pulled out of its shell, pink and wounded and obscene." The author evidently wants to distance himself from this tormented child who believes that "he is still a baby and will never grow up" -- the protagonist is always "he," never "I," and his name is not mentioned until page 88. Forces of politics and history are never far below the surface in Coetzee's work. But as in Kafka and Beckett, his two most obvious literary predecessors, they operate like huge, impersonal weather systems, dropping from the skies at random to bring individual suffering and stifle communication. Watching a "coloured" servant being mercilessly beaten, the young John Coetzee seems to feel nothing, yet we know that he believes the only reason he excels at school is his terror of being caned by the teachers. Like a prisoner, he thinks only of his own survival, imagining that if he ever meets Eddie, the whipped servant, in later life, "Eddie will have no pity on him." In this strange and haunting little book, Coetzee
appears to be casting about in his childhood for the roots of his
success as a writer: Did it spring from his marginal social position as
an English speaker from an Afrikaner background, never accepted by
either community? From his intensely passionate, sentimental attachment
to his father's family farm, which produces here some of his most
unconstrained lyrical prose? From the smothering affection of his
mother, which made him feel like a solitary specimen, both protected and
deformed? Ultimately, all such explanations are necessarily incomplete.
Coetzee is compelled to write his way out of his own South African
prison; we benefit from his struggles.
Andrew O'Hehir is a writer who lives in New York.
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