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She had wanted to write a piece about Coetzee. She does not much want to write something about a Nobelist. (The term itself sounds like a South American mispronunciation of novelist). Now if Diana praises Coetzee it will seem she is only adding her voice to the right-thinking chorus; and if she pan…

Diana finds herself thinking again what she has thought before: she should be an activist, not a writer. The thought is never serious. Still, she does not see that it avails anything to write highbrow book chat. Her reviews communicate nothing, convince people of nothing. They are a talented girl’s…

If one wants to fix a date, Coetzee’s prose began to slacken in 1994, with The Master of Petersburg, a novel about Dostoevsky. (Diana dislikes this trend of novelists writing about their literary forebears, borrowing the prestige of other writers to make use of as their own.) She recalls a sentence…

In 1999 her friends, with their miniscule New York apartments and their ten-dollar cocktails, with their purchases of expensive shoes when their paychecks arrived, followed by a diet of breakfast cereal at the end of the month (“that time of the month,” witty Stephanie called it), had developed a g…

Daniel works in Westwood for a medium-size production company. For the time being he is making enough money that he suffers Diana to stay at home, rising late, trying to write, and occasionally depositing into their joint account a check of several hundred dollars for a book review published in som…