Diary of a Bad Year

Junot Diaz recently appeared on the Colbert Report. I dearly loved his book Drown, and I’m sure I’ll read Oscar Wao sometime soon. So I was eager to see what the Pulitzer Prize winner looked like. He was much like I expected, especially the voice, but he was clearly uncomfortable on a talk show. Diaz fixed his gaze right on the table and didn’t look up much, allowing Colbert to steamroll him conversationally. Oscar Wao is about a nerdy Dominican kid, and Colbert brought up the popular canard that a book’s main character is nothing more than a verbal proxy for its author. Diaz half-heartedly disagreed, saying Oscar is pretty much the combination of everybody he ever knew, but Colbert wasn’t having it.

I was a little frustrated to see it. This is why I like showing my work to perfect strangers, but not so much to close friends – the strangers won’t have any context to try and perform a psychological reading that the friends mind, who sometimes see it as an opportunity to get inside your head without getting you drunk first. So I try to assume a distance exists between a writer and his work, that a work billed as fiction is indeed fiction and not thinly-veiled autobiography.

J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year challenged that assumption. Coetzee – my third favorite Nobel Laureate, behind Garcia Marquez and Saramago, if you wanted to know – has written a subtle and potent book with a catholic set of interests, intriguing structure, and a fearless eye, featuring yes, Coetzee himself.

I didn’t want to believe it at first. Here’s the bones of the plot: and old man named Senor C, (initials JC), born in South Africa and now residing in Australia, is writing a series of essays called Strong Opinions. Senor C encounters the lovely Anya in the laundry room of their apartment building, and he contracts the younger Filipina type the manuscript.

Now I knew that Coetzee was a South African, and obviously I knew his initials, but I never imagined he would write such a nakedly personal book. Disgrace, his other work I’ve read, had a narrator that maintained a clinical distance even while he bludgeoned you emotionally. But the evidence kept mounting. I learned that Coetzee recently became an Australian citizen, and at one point Senor C references one of his previous books, Barbarians at the Gate, which is awfully similar to Waiting for the Barbarians, a book that the real Coetzee wrote.

Who knows why this surprised me so – perhaps I didn’t want to think it possible that a writer of Coetzee’s gifts and standing would resort to something so base as self-expression, which was widely denounced in my philosophy class on aesthetics. Though now that I think about it, I don’t know why. Something about how self-expression is barred from the gates of Art because its personal nature denies it wider artistic relevance. It’s sort of like if you convinced Randomhouse to publish a selection from your diary. That’s what I recall, anyway, I only got a B+. Go read T.S. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” if you give a damn.

Okay, speaking of self-expression, there’s been way too many Is in this review. To business:

Bad Year employs a novel structure, with the page divided into thirds. The top third are the cerebral Strong Opinions. The middle is diary entries from Senor C’s perspective. The bottom is Anya’s perspective, which focuses on her relationship with her bastard boyfriend Alan as well as Senor C.

Taken in isolation, each component would work. Senor C’s Strong Opinions would form a very readable volume of essays. His diary would form a good short story about an old man at the end of the line and his gorgeous young help. Finally, Anya’s POV would be another short story, this one from the young people upstairs arguing about the opinions of an old man they don’t really understand and give no credit to. But when Coetzee weaves these all together, each component strengthens and informs the others, creating a complete picture of the titular Bad Year.

Coetzee’s protagonist has a lively intellect, and Strong Opinions raises a lot of great points. One brief essay on the cultural vehemence against pedophilia questions why we are so discomfited by movies featuring depictions of adults having sex with the underage: “Should there be a ban upon publishing in print form a story, a self-proclaimed fiction, in which an appropriately petite twenty-year-old actress plays for the camera the role of a child having sex with an adult man? If not, why insist upon a ban on the filmed version of the same story, which is no more than a transposition from conventional (verbal) to natural (photographic) signs?”

Strong Opinions also has keen insight into the writer’s status these days, and should you read Bad Year, you’ll probably want to go and read the Russian greats, for Dostoyevski (I’m not even spell-checking that) figures largely into the ending. Of course, if you aren’t a writer you might not give a shit about the writer’s status. Your mileage may vary.

One of the more clever parts about the book’s structure – and again, one doesn’t think of J.M. Coetzee as much of a gamesman with his fiction – is how there’s a sort of thematic unity to each page. Each third might deal with, say, masculinity, but since they are all examining it in a different context (1st with a social context, 2nd from an old man’s perspective, 3rd with the clash of new and old masculinity), each one colors the reading of the other. In fact, the order one reads the thirds changes the way one feels about the other two thirds, so what appears to be a straightforward book turns out to be far richer and interconnected. Diary of a Bad Year examines the transition from life to art on two levels – Senor C’s relationship with Anya changes some of his opinions, and the Diary itself does the same for Coetzee, who is no different from Senor.

Shit, I’m confused.