Dostoevsky, the subject of Coetzee’s novel The Master of Petersburg (1994), is one of the haunting presences in his fiction, alongside Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka and Daniel Defoe. Coetzee, of course, has a very different temperament to the great Russian novelist, but his work has often wrestled with the paradoxes of self-expression and the problem of finding the means to express truth when circumstances can make such an expression seem impossibly compromised. A state of grace, if such a thing can exist, cannot simply be accessed through an act of will. In Disgrace (1999), for example, David Lurie is hauled before a university disciplinary committee but mulishly refuses to cooperate. He acts against his own interests, but feels that any confession or defence he could give, any attempt to articulate his position, would be an unwarranted validation of an empty ritual. The corrupt process does not permit the expression of any meaningful truth: his disgrace is assured. The sense of disconnection is both personal and historical in a novel that is not simply concerned with South Africa’s violent past but with the difficult question of how it might be possible even to begin to acknowledge its legacy. For Coetzee, it is the writer’s task to negotiate barriers to truth, even if the attempt is doomed to fail. This is one reason for his admiration of Beckett, whose work’s integrity rests upon its rejection of all comforting fictions. Beckett, he writes in a masterly short essay in Inner Workings, ‘was an artist possessed by a vision of life without consolation or dignity or promise of grace, in the face of which our only duty – inexplicable and futile of attainment, but a duty nonetheless – is not to lie to ourselves’.

That this moral imperative entails serious formal challenges is evident in the nature and scope of Coetzee’s work. He has written in various genres – realism, autobiography, allegory, metafiction – but always with an awareness of the way each is shadowed by the others. When invited to deliver a lecture, he often prefers to read a piece of fiction rather than make a direct statement. Sections of Elizabeth Costello (2003) were first made public this way, and Coetzee’s 2003 Nobel Lecture took the form of a fictional essay which imagined the life of Robinson Crusoe after his rescue. This process of layering and deflecting, of positioning and repositioning the speaking subject, is less a form of evasiveness than an ongoing interrogation of the means of expression, an attempt to avoid the gaucheries of the confessional mode and find a way to give voice to a deeper truth, however fragmented and battered this truth might turn out to be.

In this context, as Derek Attridge points out in his brief introduction, Inner Workings is of interest partly because it contains occasional writings. It is a collection of ‘more direct compositions’ which might ‘throw light on the often oblique novels’. Its twenty-one essays, most of which were written for the New York Review of Books, are all works of criticism, a criterion that has been strictly applied. The brilliant Nobel Lecture, for example, though it might be considered a ‘literary essay’, is not included; nor is the essay that Coetzee published in Meanjin in 2005, which discussed some of the issues arising from the translation of his own work – an insightful piece which might have complemented Inner Working’s attentive readings of writers in translation.

The volume divides evenly into two distinct sections. The first half considers twentieth-century central-European writers, including some underappreciated figures, such as the Triestine novelist Italo Svevo, who took English lessons from an aspiring writer named James Joyce and became the inspiration for the character of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses (1922); and Robert Walser, the Swiss belletrist admired by Kafka. The second half consists of essays on Anglophone writers (with one exception: Gabriel García Márquez), including several Americans. Of note, too, is the fact that no less than seven of Coetzee’s subjects are fellow Nobel Laureates, among them William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer and V.S. Naipaul.

As a critic, Coetzee is a model of disinterestedness. He is a disciplined and judicious reader, and proceeds with patience and care. His tone is measured, which is not to say he is averse to delivering forceful judgments. Though his essays on Faulkner and Whitman acknowledge the shortcomings of biographical criticism, especially when it veers into psychological speculation, he generally outlines a writer’s historical circumstances before moving on to a discussion of the work. This contextualising is particularly significant for the European writers, many of whom are Jewish, because their art is invariably touched by the ghastly reality of two world wars, culminating in the Holocaust.

Coetzee is deeply read in modernist literature and sensitive to the need of these writers, in the face of dislocation and violence, to break with traditional forms as a matter of urgency. A recurring idea in these essays is that the interrogation of style and technique is not superficial, but fundamental to literature’s purpose. Walser’s prose writings, though ironic and fragmentary, are ultimately an exercise in self-examination: in his own words, they form one ‘long, plotless, realistic story’ that is a ‘cut up or disjointed book of the self [Ich-buch]’. Robert Musil derived from Nietzsche ‘a recognition that art can itself be a form of intellectual exploration’ and ‘a mode of philosophising, aphoristic rather than systematic’. At the time of his death, Walter Benjamin was working toward an ambitious new form of criticism in which allegory ‘could take over the role of abstract thought’, creating ‘meanings that do not need the intrusion of theory’. The essay on Paul Celan is a fascinating discussion of his struggle to find a way to write poetry in German after the language had been so thoroughly debased by Nazism.

Inner Workings’s engagement with American writers is interesting for slightly different reasons. Coetzee’s reserved manner does not have a natural affinity with the brash assertiveness of the American literary tradition, but he brings the critical potential of this distance to bear effectively. This is apparent in the essay on Saul Bellow’s early fiction, in which Coetzee downplays the merits of Bellow’s celebrated third novel, The Adventures of Augie March (1953). Augie’s distinctively American voice has its appeal: ‘Not since Mark Twain had an American handled the demotic with such verve.’ But this energetic self-projection also lapses into ‘portentous rumination and gaseous language’, and undercuts the novel’s capacity for intelligent reflection. Citing a particularly jittery passage, he asks: ‘At what point does [Augie’s] absorption in the here and now turn to idiocy?’

Coetzee is drawn instead to Bellow’s dark, underrated, second novel, The Victim (1947), which is more ‘European’ in its atmosphere, contains some of Bellow’s ‘most masterly understated prose’, and takes its philosophical cues from existentialism and Dostoevsky. The essay is a shrewd piece of revisionist criticism, drawing the achievement of the great American writer closer to Coetzee’s own, but it also underscores the moral seriousness at the heart of Coetzee’s literary project.

Criticism is not necessarily as direct as it seems. There is always the mask of someone else’s writing to speak through. Yet artist-critics will inevitably have their judgments read as reflections upon their own work. It is hardly possible to read Coetzee’s comments on the challenges faced by Nadine Gordimer as a South African writer without the spectre of his own novels shimmering behind them. The essays in Inner Workings are, however, excellent pieces of literary criticism in their own right. They may be occasional writings, but Coetzee brings to them all the authority and intelligence that characterise his fiction.