If across the world J. M. Coetzee enjoys the reputation of a literary master craftsman, in the academy poststructuralist critics generally see him as the anti-realist Lone Ranger whose novels give short shrift to the naive realism that dominated South Africa’s literary landscape in the twentieth century. Like most readers they relish the aesthetic satisfactions that his chiseled prose provides, but it is for the supposedly agnostic perspective that his novels bring to bear on the “master narratives” and ethical certitudes of the late twentieth century that they most vociferously acclaim him. It is this widely held understanding of Coetzee as a socio-politically disengaged aesthete that Jarad Zimbler vigorously contests in J. M. Coetzee and the Politics of Style (2014). In what must be the most rigorous analyses of Coetzee’s literary style to date, Zimbler demonstrates that, far from making him a Jacques Derrida toiling away in modernism’s literary Karoo, the innovative dimensions of his literary aesthetic mark Coetzee as a novelist for whom literary mimesis remains the guiding principle of his creative process.

For Zimbler, Coetzee’s literary style is a contextual “value” whose interpretive significance we can grasp if we read his novels comparatively. Methodologically, this means submitting each novel to the rigors of textual explication and contrasting it with one of the competing styles by which peers have represented those realities in prose fiction. By systematically analyzing the stylistic peculiarities of Coetzee’s prose in each novel (and one digital poem) and then reading these comparatively against or alongside the styles of his literary peers, Zimbler repeatedly generates new insights into those early novels that Coetzee’s readers assume they fully understand.

His reading of Dusklands (1974) and In the Heart of the Country (1977) are exemplary of this methodology. After exposing the literary inadequacies of Alex La Guma’s expansive prose and the Sestigers’ “cosmopolitan aestheticism,” as well as the aesthetic limits of European literary modernism (Beckett, Nabokov, and Kafka), Zimbler demonstrates through a close reading of both novels that Coetzee’s “bare prose” is itself the expression, at the level of the aesthetic, of the negation of social being that apartheid inherited, refined, and brutally enforced in South Africa. In his discussion of Waiting for the Barbarians, he demonstrates how Sepamla, Serote, Mtshali, and Gwala (South Africa’s anti-lyrical Black Consciousness poets) as well as Mauriac, Robbe-Grillet, and Sarraute (the anti-humanist French avant garde) serve as foils for the lyrical prose by which, even in the darkest moments, the narrative affirms our persistent desire for “a fuller humanity.” In Life & Times of Michael K (1983), Coetzee’s metaphors of “existential reduction” are shown to be more effective tropes for rendering the “thinness” of apartheid South Africa’s “reality” than Nadine Gordimer’s “trans-social metaphors.”

Zimbler almost abandons this comparative analytical methodology in his readings of Foe (1986), Age of Iron (1990), The Master of Petersburg (1994), and Disgrace (1999), all “Middle Fiction” narratives that, as he points out, thematize “need.” As if affected by the same thematics of need that he claims inspired Coetzee to adopt “a language of the soul” that gestures toward the extra-linguistic world, his analysis of lexis and syntax and highly nuanced discussions of “substance” in Foe, “soul” in Age of Iron, “spirit” in The Master of Petersburg, and “heart” in Disgrace become, by contrast, almost decontextualized and relatively abstruse. Just why this happens is uncertain. Far more certain and, I think, more important, is Zimbler’s rationale for undertaking this project. At the end of his Introduction, he declares that one reason he undertook a stylistic analysis of Coetzee’s writing is to redirect the attention of postcolonial criticism to “questions of literary technique.” Few who read this book, especially postcolonialists who over the years have watched in dismay as poststructuralist criticism discarded and diminished the value of Coetzee’s “South African field,” would deny that he succeeds immensely in this undertaking.