Ever-reluctant to follow the obvious path, let alone stick to a formula, J.M. Coetzee roundly reconfigures his fictionalised memoir cycle in this oblique, intimately rewarding third installment. Abandoning the relatively direct tack of Boyhood and Youth, Summertime focuses on Coetzee’s life in the early 1970s, when he was a thirty-something quasi-academic on the verge of becoming South Africa’s best-known novelist. Instead of the single-narrator, third-person format of the earlier volumes, this passage is told from the perspective of five of the author’s acquaintances at the time. Among them are Julia, a former lover; Margot, a beloved cousin; and the gossipy, proud Brazilian mother of one of his students. These interviews, conducted posthumously by a British biographer (Coetzee himself, according to the book’s conceit, has died), are bookended by contemporaneous entries from the author’s journal entries.

Discerning how much of this is made up is part of the joy of Summertime, although devotees of Disgrace and Coetzee’s other, more traditionally structured novels likely lost patience with such metafictional antics long ago. It’s their loss: besides giving Coetzee the distance to ruthlessly scrutinise his family history, early career and public persona, the approach frees him to arrive at a compassionate reckoning with the more troubling relationships in this phase of his adulthood, particularly with his elderly father.

If the self-portrait Coetzee paints of an emotional and social cripple, an uninspired teacher and a lousy lay – indeed, as Julia puts it, someone “not fully human” – is wince-inducing (sometimes comically so), it also calls into question the demands we place on art and the people who make it. Late in the book an ex-colleague asserts that Coetzee “had no special sensitivity… no original insight into the human condition. He was just a man, a man of his time.” Arguable as this assessment is, Summertime dares us to ponder why that shouldn’t be enough.

Mark Holcomb