Boyhood: Scenes From a Provincial Life (review)

and the town's response to her mother's deed. Sibyl's birthing assistant tells police that blood spurted from the incisions made in the "dead" woman's flesh, indicating that she was alive. Meanwhile, local doctors feel obligated to warn the public of the inherent dangers connected with home births. During the subsequent trial, it is revealed that the dead woman was anemic, and the prosecution makes a strong case that Sibyl behaved irresponsibly in failing to recommend a hospital birth. As further light is shed upon the situation by both sides, the issue becomes increasingly perplexing. We continue to sympathize with the Danforths, but grow uncertain as to how justice should best be served. Indeed, the strength of the novel lies in Bohjalian's ability to evenly balance the multiple truths that emerge within passionate human conflicts. Most of the novel's big questions, both moral and factual , remain unanswered. Bohjalian couples this exploration of a controversial issue with keen narrative skills that make Midwives an exciting read. (MM) Boyhood: Scenes From a Provincial Life by J.M. Coetzee Viking, 1997, 208 pp., $22.95 In his fourth work of nonfiction, the distinguished South African novelist has put his own life under the microscope. Coetzee's previous works include the acclaimed Waiting for the Barbarians and The Life and Times ofMichael K, for which he won the Booker Prize. His writings are characteristically dark, and his characters suffer from the nightmarish political and civil disorder engendered by apartheid. Among the ranks of eminent South African writers like Nadine Gordimer, Alan Paton and Dennis Brutus, Coetzee is the chronicler of the interior self, and his memoir focuses on his own inner life as a child. His somewhat unusual choice of narrative point of view for a memoir —third person, present tense— gives the experiences of the young Coetzee a jarring potency while at the same time distancing him. Growing up in a middle class Afrikaner family, in a city ninety miles from Cape Town in the hinterlands of South Africa, the author was a precocious, perceptive and squeamishly self-conscious child, easily upset by the pretenses of his parents, by their class covetousness and disgust with one another. Though the troubles of his childhood, at first glance, are not extraordinary, they are experienced by a disiUusioned child agonized by his need to separate himself from his world. He is sensitive to the cruelty and prejudice that rage deeply within Afrikaner society. The callous bullying ofhisAfrikaner schoolmates, who on one occasion chase him down and force a Uve caterpillar into his mouth, is a continual source of distress to him. He finds himself drawn to the protection of his mother but disturbed by her self-effacing love. He feels shame over the erotic currents surging through him, feelings stirred not by girls but by slender, 178 · The Missouri Review brown-skinned boys and nude male statuary. Though he has no notion of acting on his homoerotic impulses, he is distressed by his solitary abnormality . The only place he feels safe from ostracism is his grandfather's sheep farm, where life is sane and uncompUcated. Yet even this tranquil place is tainted for him when he witnesses the scene of newborn lambs being neutered, their testicles excised by the teeth of a farmhand. What makes this memoir so engrossing is that it reads like a novel. Coetzee's portrait of hypersensitive youth is extraordinarily bleak, but wrenchingly honest. (EE) Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography by Peter Conn Cambridge University Press, 1996, 468 pp., $29.95 Known to many Americans only as the author of The Good Earth, Pearl Buck in fact wrote over seventy books, working in virtually every genre: novels, short stories, plays, biographies, autobiography, translations , children's literature, essays, journalism and poetry. She combined her prodigious literary production with a commitment to human service. Among her humanitarian accomplishments was the founding, in 1949, of Welcome House, the first international , interracial adoption agency in the United States. Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker was a missionary's daughter. Her father, Absalom, a biblical literalist incapable of showing affection, had arrived in China in 1880 with his wife, Carrie, who suffered homesickness quietly...