![]() ![]() Coetzee, the inventive, austere, and penetrating South African novelist and critic, has published, in his early sixties, the second installment of what seems to be an ongoing memoirist project: “Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II” (Viking $22.95). And an increasing number of writers begin, as did Frank Conroy in “Stop-Time,” with autobiography, as if to get themselves out of the way before they settle to business. Others, like Philip Roth in “The Facts,” take a mid-career opportunity to establish, amid a crowd of fictions, some baseline data. ![]() The autobiographical impulse seizes some novelists, such as Henry James, at the end of their creative labors they relax at last from the trouble of disguise and manipulation and tell it like it was, as it is remembered, much as the host of a generous feast avails himself of his guests’ garnered good will by sleepily rambling on about himself. ![]()
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