Few answers in “Schooldays of Jesus”
The Schooldays of Jesus By J.M. Coetzee (Viking)
In 1999, the South African writer J.M. Coetzee topped his already celebrated career by publishing “Disgrace,” an unforgettable novel that earned him a second Man Booker Prize — the first time anyone had done that. Four years later, he won the Nobel Prize in literature. But since then, his published fiction has strained mightily to repel any reader who might be interested.
Perhaps that’s as it should be. If you’re 77 years old and you’ve collected every literary prize in the world, you ought to be able to write whatever you please. But caveat emptor. “The Schooldays of Jesus,” Coetzee’s new novel, is a sequel to his equally enigmatic book “The Childhood of Jesus” (2013). You can be forgiven for assuming that these novels follow the life of, say, Jesus. But despite those titles, a working familiarity with the Gospels will provide little context for interpreting this ongoing saga.
There is a precocious child, but he’s known as David, and he’s not Jewish, nor is he graced with any unusual shine of divinity. In the first novel, he is informally adopted by a man named Simón, who is determined to find the boy’s mother. They eventually settle on a woman named Inés and set up what passes for a chaste little family.
As the new novel begins, this odd trio are “fugitives from the law,” running from overzealous school authorities and an impending census. It’s tempting to imagine this is an allusion to Caesar’s decree mentioned by Luke, but resist! — only frustration lies in that direction. The details of these novels cannot be matched up in any schematic way with the events of Jesus’ life. Some readers may find this dissonance freeing. To me, it’s irritatingly coy. Like the bystanders in the Gospel of John, I’m left asking: “How long dost thou make us to doubt? If thou be the Christ, tell us plainly.”
As with so much about these stories, the time and setting are imprecise. Simón and his makeshift family arrive in a benevolent city with a vaguely European socialist vibe. The technology — cars, radios — suggests the 1930s.
The most satisfying parts of the novel come early as Simón struggles to provide David with the love and direction the boy needs. Coetzee has an impeccable ear for the tender patter between a curious child and a conscientious father figure who never wants to lose his patience. David can be trying; he persistently asks questions about sex and death and other mysteries beyond his comprehension. He’s quick to claim that Simón doesn’t understand him, doesn’t love him. Simón responds in a clear and measured way, but privately the boy’s accusations shake his confidence about his life and the role he’s assumed with this icy woman.
But the pleasure of this relationship is soon eclipsed by other matters. Anxious about David’s education, Simón and Inés decide to send the boy to the Dance Academy, which professes a strikingly unorthodox theory of mathematics. On parent-teacher night, the headmistress explains:
“Our Academy is dedicated to guiding the souls of our students toward that realm, to bringing them in accord with the great underlying movement of the universe, or, as we prefer to say, the dance of the universe. To bring the numbers down from where they reside, to allow them to manifest themselves in our midst, to give them body, we rely on dance. Yes, here in the academy we dance, not in a graceless, carnal, or disorderly way, but body and soul together, so as to bring the numbers to life. As music enters us and moves us in dance, so the numbers cease to be mere ideas, mere phantoms, and become real.”
If Joan Quigley had opened a dance studio, it might have sounded like this, which is just the first indication that something is seriously odd here. But David loves the staff and seems destined to be the school’s finest student. (His dance of No. 7 is, by all accounts, transcendent!)
Alas, this headache-inducing gibberish is soon overwhelmed by the rantings of a sex criminal named Dmitri who used to work at the Academy. At his trial — and through several tedious reappearances that could make you a death-penalty supporter — we endure long, repetitive discussions about the mystery of why he killed the woman he loved. Having to read the judge’s semantic analysis feels crueler than any punishment Dmitri might earn:
“Your guilt: let us take a moment to ponder that phrase. What does it mean, what does it ever mean, to speak of my guil or your guilt or our guilt in respect to some action or other? What if we were not ourselves, or not fully ourselves, when the action in question was performed? Was the action then ours? Why, when people have performed heinous deeds, do they commonly say afterwards, I cannot explain why I did, I was beside myself, I was not myself?”
There’s no denying the haunting quality of Coetzee’s measured prose, his ability to suspend ordinary events in a world just a few degrees away from our own. But to what end? Although “The Childhood of Jesus” and “The Schooldays of Jesus” are presented as allegories, they never yield any interesting allegorical meaning. The result is a story that suggests more profundity than it ever incarnates.