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 about a woman with whom Dostoevsky is conducting an affair: “She is in his arms like Jeanne d’Arc in the flames: the spirit wrestling against its bonds while the body burns away.” The reference to Saint Joan is superfluous, therefore pretentious, and the rest of the short sentence sprawls, as far as is possible in its narrow bed, with religious hyperbole and bookish cliché. It reveals that Coetzee has paid visits to the church and the library; it does not persuade Diana that he knows anything of a woman’s thoughts in bed.

It is curious that depictions of women having sex (the one doing research, the other perishing in secondhand metaphorical flames) should occasion such bad writing on Coetzee’s part. Yet Coetzee can be a bad writer about plenty of things: “a chill down his spine”; “each man is an island”; “But it is too late now, the damage is done”; “Now he is in a fight for his life.” Diana has read through the recent book Youth striking out portions of his sentences as if she were his editor. And in Youth, too, he has his younger self think idiotic thoughts: “Are all Englishwomen so beautiful when their clothes are off, he wonders.” A young man who has ridden the Tube does not plausibly wonder this. And the refusal to attribute to his younger self an original thought or a charitable impulse is a failure of realism. Sometime in the nineties Coetzee, as stylist and psychologist, slipped, and even Disgrace, the best of the later books (with the chill of David Lurie’s impending extinction blowing through it), is uneven in these respects.