Paul Auster, a writer who has built a large work out of coincidence, catches this side of smoking perfectly in the script for the movie Smoke. A series of events and improbable friendships arise out of random meetings in the smoke shop, presided over by Harvey Keitel’s salesman, Augie.2 Black, white, rich, poor, man, woman, smokers have the smoker’s code and the smoker’s bond. It’s a basic form of solidarity and one of the few left. Someone asks you for a cigarette, you give it willingly: a light, no problem. From there anything can happen, or nothing else. It’s a rare moment of sharing among strangers, an almost ancient form of hospitality in the inhospitable culture of great modern cities.

And I had grand notions, too. I had quit hockey because I was too slow, but also so that I could read Kierkegaard. My history teacher’s list was nice, but here was Fear and Trembling. Here The Sickness Unto Death. I considered dipping into Weber. Occasionally the word Foucault would float from my tongue, a trial balloon. In such moods I denounced Ferdinand, he was not Harvard!, but at the end of the year I stayed with him. We were hanging out with lacrosse players and their girlfriends, I was badly drunk three nights a week, and some of my morning classes went by unattended, went by anyway, while I lay in bed moaning. And yet my political-science professor had still sent one of my papers to a peer-reviewed journal and laughed with gusto when I showed him my several fake IDs—on one of them my name was Jürgen Habermas. (In the little basement shop in downtown Boston, I had indignantly demanded the umlaut. “Yeurgen Habermas, not Yoorgen. Yeurgen!”) There seemed, in short, to be no system I couldn’t beat, whether I stayed with Ferdinand or not. In the weeks before rooming groups were due, I made a few half-hearted sorties in the Freshman Union to some of the more articulate kids I’d met in my classes, but they were as wary as they were intelligent, their groups had congealed and they liked it that way, and anyhow I hadn’t yet learned how to talk with them, and instead of Foucault the word douchebag kept escaping, like a dark secret, from my lips.

She began to come by in the evenings, and often she was drunk. Are the rich very different from you and me? Judge for yourself. She was drunk and it was my role to sit in the room I shared with Ferdinand and try to work on my sophomore paper. “It’s important that you do this,” Ferdinand told me the second time she was over and they sat in the common room, watching our old Simpsons tape. “You need to be, like, The Scholar. It creates an atmosphere.”

I looked at her—closely, closely. She resembled royalty, I tell you, she was practically the leader of the free world. Yet she lacked speech. I—on the other hand—standing in that little room, my fingertips still warm from the keyboard—I did not lack it! “But that’s just it!” I began. “I mean, we’re in college. It’s time to get serious! It’s time to get to the bottom of things. The meaning of them. I mean—”

And as I began to expound on this, I thought I saw her looking at me in a way I hadn’t seen a woman look at me in a long time. Probably she wasn’t, or she was just startled by all the words, but I was already examining the ethical implications. And I took a deep breath, a pause, because first I needed to tell her what I thought of things, and I needed to blow her mind. It wasn’t Ferdinand himself that I wanted to dissuade her from, exactly, and not in favor of me, per se, but the idea of Ferdinand, and the idea of me—it was important that I arranged these properly in her mind. Because fun—I turned the word over in my mind. Did she mean sex? Boats? Ice cream? There was right action and wrong action. There was Kierkegaard. There was fun, and then there were those ten minutes before the Grille closed, the music turned off, the lights coming up to reveal the beer spilled on the floor, the plastic cups lying there, and people’s coats had fallen off the little coat ledge in the corner, and you’d be going home alone. And how was I going to explain all this to anyone? To Lauren, for example, poor privileged Lauren for whom no amount of grooming and training would turn her into the person she actually wanted to be? To Lauren, who’d passed out on my bed?

And then, about a month after that happened, things came to a head in Leverett J-12. I had been buried in Widener, reading all of Lincoln’s little notes and letters, all sixteen volumes, and finishing my great Lincoln paper, though admittedly much of my time was spent imagining what it would be like to already be the author of a great Lincoln paper. Would I grant interviews? But now things were getting hairy, the deadline was nine in the morning, and I had to finish the Lincoln, for no one else would. When they stumbled in at around three I was already in bed, turning some final phrases over in my mind. When I heard them pause in the front hall to take off their jackets and then paw each other for five minutes—transparent were the ways of Ferdinand to me—I knew I should get up. The trip to the couch was momentous, and though I wore a fairly new T-shirt and my best boxers I felt underdressed. I took my laptop along and they smiled sheepishly at me, apologizing, as they walked past into the bedroom. And Lauren, happy and seeing me there on the ridiculous couch, my face illuminated in simulated concentration by the bright nimbus of the laptop, Lauren winked.

Most of us just have simple dissatisfaction. The sense that each or any moment might be won for experience, but is lost to time instead, leaves a residue of perpetual loss. We find out that every situation is withdrawn from us finally, and we didn’t have the will to take it far enough when we still could. When a cloud hangs over me, I think: “I was never the Casanova I meant to be: I was too slow. I was never the traveler I meant to be: I liked my comforts too much at home. I never built a cabin in the woods: I’m no carpenter. I never took the drugs I planned to take: I thought I’d lose my mind.” But I am bored by Casanovas, inveterate travelers, nature lovers, and the drug-obsessed, as they speak from the narrowness of their exhaustive experience of one thing. Nor can I make anyone feel what I did do. Trying to get a taste of everything, besides, gave me a depth of understanding of no one thing—I missed the experience of insight for a diffuse ambition.

Truly dissatisfied persons, maybe more than anybody else, take a large proportion of their experience from books. Or they find they can double their own little experience, and make a second pass at the day-to-day, by writing it down. Poor scribblers! Such people are closest to a solution, and yet to everyone else they seem to be using up time, wasting life, as they spend fewer hours “living” than anyone, and gain less direct experience. Serious reading often starts from a deep frustration with living. Keeping a journal is a sure sign of the attempt to preserve experience by desperate measures. These poor dissatisfied people take photographs, make albums, keep souvenirs and scrapbooks. And still they always ask: “What have I done?”

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 some prestigious outlet. As for the psychological superstructure sponsored by this economic base, you might say that Daniel absorbs Diana’s anxiety and other outsize moods, while Diana prods Daniel out of his mere decency and competence into a liveliness he might not otherwise experience. And of course there is much more than that going on. But she respects their happiness enough not to investigate its sources.

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 gloss of metropolitan toughness which Diana seemed unable to acquire. The strange nature of this toughness was to demonstrate that you were having a good time in the city, that you did not apologize for or feel embarrassed by your pleasures. And Diana too had drunk her share of vodka gimlets; had slept with enough guys to form an indie-rock band or two; and had sunk several paychecks into such fancy vegan shoes that you couldn’t tell the difference from leather. It was absurd: one night out at dinner in her tall vegan sling backs, and cuddled up the next pajama-clad with J. M. Coetzee. Nor when she met Daniel and fell rapidly, gratefully in love with him, did he solve her contradiction. What he did was look on it with sympathy, with—if she is required to define that look—a mixture of condescension and admiration such as one shows toward the superior sensitivities of a gifted child.

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.

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 brittle recital, more or less pleasant on the ear. Sometimes people offer that she writes well; never do they say she has induced them to think.