Q

Youth, to me, was a masculine version of The Bell Jar.

Thematically, semi-autobiographies of aspiring writers on the cusp of adulthood. The immensity of every decision, the sudden departure from the refuge of childhood. Both protagonists are racked with ideals.

The difference is in the way each author treats their personages’ ideals. We all know how Plath ends up soon after, and in her resignation there is an quiet understanding that her ideals were foolish. Predetermination; once the book begins, our protagonist is already aware of the end – because she is Plath at the end of her journey. The Bell Jar becomes fatalistic, the whole ride through. Coetzee, on the other hand, lives – and I imagine him to be a happy man. In Youth he recognizes that his ideals failed him, and in turn he has failed his ideals – but he never once denounced them. There’s a childlike, sheepish embracing of romance and beauty – an obstinate refusal to see how he teeters on pretension. Both novels end the way I love it – like life. Truncated, uncertain. It doesn’t suggest hope or hint at despair. It just is that.

I really liked Youth because I could see myself, vaguely, in it. The endless reading, the avoidance of commitment, the refusal to work if it’ll take time from what I like to do despite all sensibilities. He fumbles around adult decisions and obscurely thinks that he’s made the wrong choices – except he’ll never know.

The stretch where he quit his job, woke up each morning with that guilty freedom, walking and reading ceaselessly, the stagnant pages where his poems/prose should be because he gained unfortunate consciousness of self. And I wanted to say: that’s my life! something I can rarely do for books.

Besides that – being a confused fresh adult with commitment issues thrown into the world – I have little in common with him. His dull misery, the desire to be submerged in suffering or full misery, I don’t get. Again, the childlike, indulgent ideals he embraced as a Youth. I’m pretty sure Coetzee has grown out of that – or he wouldn’t be able to write so succinctly of his experiences. (In fact he captured the entire ignorance of youthful ideals very well which must have been somewhat humiliating for him to go through again.)

Why I thought of The Bell Jar when reading Youth is cuz of something more intangible. A short section of it, at the peak of his doubts and before he found some kind of transformation, at his most indulgent of ramblings – came that feeling of absolute desolation. By desolation I mean that abysmal, striking revelation that there’s nothing to everything. Basically that There Is No Point.

Celine’s experience with the Bell Jar was more intense than mine. While she was at it, she claimed to feel as Plath did, as if she were in a Bell Jar and for awhile I think she was experiencing that – absolute desolation. I finished mine in one sitting – on a journey home and before a nap, which gave me space to compartmentalize it from the rest of my life, so it didn’t hit as bad. But I recognized the sudden, struggling fear while reading, that Plath might be right – that there might really not be a point in anything at all. Which I glimpsed in Coetzee before John found change.

It’s so easy to sink.