The Special Child

In his unsettling trilogy about a possibly divine boy, J. M. Coetzee asks how we recognize the truth when it enters the world.

- By William Deresiewicz

As he passed his 70th birthday, J. M. Coetzee— South African–born Nobel laure­ ate, two­time winner of the Booker Prize, among the greatest living writers in the English language— embarked on a highly atypical series of works. His previous 14 novels, all shorter than 300 pages, pos­ sessed a spare, compressed intensity of lan­ guage and design. Now he has completed a trilogy— The Childhood of Jesus, The Schooldays of Jesus, and finally The Death of Jesus—that sprawls to more than 750. It is ruminative, meandering, and open­ended. Its prose is flat; its mood is often slack. It is strange, enigmatic, unsettling. And oddest of all, it is not about Jesus.