Incorrigible Wit

Page 22 American Book Review Herzinger continued from previous page the anti-terrorist legislation then pending in the Australian legislature seem to be, first, that they are hypocritical (“Though dropping bombs from high altitude upon a sleeping village is no less an act of terror than blowing oneself up in a crowd, it is perfectly legal to speak well of aerial bombing”); and second, that they spectacularly fulfill a kind of desirable dramatic function (“The situation of the suicide bomber is not without tragic potential”). Accusing legislators of hypocrisy and a failure to note tragic potential do not strike me as being adequately persuasive accusations. And in yet another essay, he suggests that the paranoid interpretations of the US administration with regard toAl Qaeda—a concern worth certainly worth discussing—have their source in literature classes in the US, where “the critic must accept nothing whatsoever at face value.” Now, whatever one’s concerns about the consequences of literary theory in the classroom, the likelihood that it in any way infected the thinking of the Bush administration is patently, if perhaps sadly, ridiculous. In fact, Señor C’s reflections on George W. Bush are no stronger and, in fact, less strikingly outraged than those we might hear by spending an evening with Keith Olbermann. Another part of the problem, and perhaps the most important part, is that the effect of Anya on Señor C and his work—which is surely somewhere near the dramatic center of the novel—is at best frail. The reader, who knows that this relationship is meant to have an impact on the eminent writer, struggles to find much evidence for it, and fails in the end to feel it. Coetzee is more successful in suggesting the impact that Señor C has onAnya, though he seems to be a bit secretive about exactly how it develops. A telling moment in her development is the horrifying scene late in the novel, when Anya and Alan are invited to dinner by Señor C and Alan manages to reveal himself as an almost unparalleled boor. But even this scene is not quite successful in the context of the whole. The problem is thatAlan is so unshadedly grotesque that it undercuts our ability to register Anya’s subsequent rejection of him as some sort of movement in her development, a newfound capacity to choose Señor C’s civility over Alan’s incivility, for instance. Instead, we see it as something much less interesting—as an example of how a young woman forced to suffer the indignities of her boyfriend’s barbaric behavior will probably send him packing. Diary of a Bad Year is not among Coetzee’s best novels. And even those we might count among his best novels—Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), The Life and Times of Michael K (1983), and Disgrace (1999), for instance—may not, finally, have enough heart or soul or generosity to be undebatably great. Nevertheless, in Diary of a Bad Year, however flawed it may be, Coetzee tries again to suggest the ways we might become better, and the attempt, as Señor C says of Dostoevsky, can “clear one’s eyesight” and “fortify one’s arm.” His strong emotional and intellectual connection to a set of virtues which sometimes seems almost remote from us, his continued attention to the importance of the writer in relation to the serious matters of injustice, honesty, honor, shame (or lack of it), kindness, fidelity, devotion, service, courage, conviction, responsibility, and truth makes anything he writes worth our attention. Kim Herzinger is a critic and fiction writer, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and writer on minimalism and other contemporary literary phenomena; he is editing the collected works of Donald Barthelme including, most recently, Flying to America: 45 More Stories. Incorrigible Wit Charles Marowitz The Letters of Noël Coward Noël Coward Edited by Barry Day Knopf http://www.randomhouse.com 780 pages; cloth, $37.50 My arrival in England in the mid-50s coincided with the arrival of the so-called “New Wave,” the headliners of which were John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Harold Pinter, and John Arden. Brits had recovered from...