No Country, This, for Old Men

In Disgracewe all make do with a great deal less. The characters lose much certainly, but from the beginning the prose of Disgrace seems underpopulated. Through its free indirect style, we observe David Lurie clearly enough, with little else to distract us, but we observe him, as it were, telescopically, with each item in his mental inventory at the same middle distance from us. This is a narrative without close-ups.

What we discover in Disgrace are the limits of Lurie's ethical understanding, and possibly our own. The book proposes different methods of situating ourselves ethically — Romantic, institutional, aesthetical, allegorical — but eventually reveals all of these as inadequate. All of these methods rest on the illusion that other people are ultimately comprehensible to our own imaginative sympathy. The consequences of this, as played out in Coetzee's plot and language, are to collapse the grounds of our usual ethical methods. Without this foundation, the possibility of raising an ethical society (in post-apartheid South Africa or anywhere else) seems impossible.