Slow Man
By J.M. Coetzee
272 pages, Penguin (2005)

It must seem to many of my friends, into whose hands I endlessly thrust books and magazine pieces, that in the last six months since I moved to New Orleans I have loved and been excited by most things I’ve read. That’s not true at all. I’m actually ridiculously picky and opinionated and read quite a lot and am thoroughly indifferent to most of it. But once I read a bad book that’s bad in an uninteresting way, I never have to see it again. The black hole under my (subletted) bed sucks it right up.

The hole doesn’t err, either. Not once have I found I book I enjoyed and missed under my bed, or even a book I grudgingly admired but passionately disliked—those stay faithfully in their proper place next to it. Take Who Can Save Us Now?, an anthology of superhero stories from which I thoroughly enjoyed the first selection. I tucked it into the space between my mattress and bedframe, so it would be ready for its next reading. It didn’t fall, it didn’t budge—the bed knew where the book’s place was, and held it there through several enjoyable stories. Then I tried another story in it. That story sucked. I thought about writing a blog post in which I complained about the tendency of anthology editors not to hold their own pieces to the same standard of quality they demand from other selections. That provided a nice few minutes of blogdreaming and then I plum forgot. No surprise that I forgot—the book was gone. The bed, no doubt sensing my displeasure, had dropped it into the black hole. I didn’t see it again until yesterday, when I went hunting for a shoe. Now it’s bent into a harsh, clamped curve from its time in the netherworld. And I don’t even care.

But when I found it, I noticed another book behind it and—oops. This one, I realized, I’d forgotten about not once but twice. Just two days after finishing it, I recalled, I’d been talking to a friend and could not remember what novel I’d just finished. Oh, I knew there was one, knew I’d spent my last few nights immersed in some story-world. But I’d forgotten it as thoroughly as one forgets a dream upon waking. And then, well, the black hole came a-calling for it, apparently.

Possibly I should just let it languish there. Coetzee is amazing; who cares if he writes one less than stellar book? All the obvious themes here—the tyranny of aging, the appeal of youth, the hope and madness of love, the difficulty in learning to live fully, learning to be the main character in one’s own life—are subthemes or not even that, just intimations, in his novel Foe, and yet they’re still better explored in that book. The trick this one relies on, bringing Elizabeth Costello (the main character from Coetzee’s novel titled after her) in to sort of urge the main character here, Paul Rayment, to become more of a character, to take possession of his life and his story, is a perfectly fine postmodern (it still pains me to type that word) idea, but not nearly as clever as it would have to be to sustain an entire book or as surprising as you get the feeling it’s supposed to be. By the end she’s a character, not just a trick, but not a very compelling one. Tired and beaten, actually. The book doesn’t so much end as peter out—you get the feeling that Costello and Rayment are just too tired to keep coming up with interesting actions or dialogue, that Coetzee has wrung everything out of the conceit that he can and still hasn’t reached his point, and so it just ends. It’s all very blah, and not even in a way that works interestingly with the title words “slow man.” Just blah.

Basically, everything Coetzee does here he did better in Foe, where it wasn’t even the main point. So I’m returning Slow Man to its rightful resting place. And I suppose I should consider myself lucky that in two days, I’ll likely forget having unearthed it at all.

Next week I move back into my apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where my bed has yet to demonstrate the same sorting qualities I rely upon here. I’m concerned.