J. M. Coetzee writes the way Ivan Lendl played tennis:
authoritatively but grimly. There isn’t much warmth in the performance. One
doubts, for that matter, that either man would consider “performance” to be part
of his job description. The Good Story
is an exchange of letters between the Nobel Prize winning novelist and the
psychologist Arabella Kurtz, who practices and teaches in England. The book is
austere and mannered, especially on Coetzee’s side. But it’s rewarding too, in
a purely intellectual way. Stick with the dialectic and you’ll be repaid with moments
of limpid insight, like outbreaks of sunshine on a frosty day. The project’s premise is that Coetzee, as a novelist “sympathetically disposed” to psychoanalysis, wants to open a dialogue with Kurtz about the connections between Freudian therapy and fiction writing ... [read more]
