Last year I went on a Coetzee binge—J.M., that is. He became my favorite writer in no time.

I started with Youth after riffling it on someone's shelf. It is an excellent introduction. Coetzee's most distinctive trait is on evidence: his utterly low-key delivery, whereby he builds item on item, developing a world, our world, in deadpan limpidity.

Our sympathy toward his clearly autobiographical hero, described in the 3rd person, is undiminished by the deadpan tone, and nor does the writing lose any power or personal detail from this. The hero has a threadbare diet "Rousseau would approve of, or Plato," consisting of "marrowbones and beans and celery." There is texture in this; and the couple of sentences that communicate this spell tomes about his background, and his dreams. The prose itself is not without savor. It has a pleasing rhythm, one without thunder but just some rhythm of storytelling—concise, sharp storytelling.

The story of Youth is, to my reckoning, the ultimate one: young, intelligent boy alone survives at the bone, dreams of glory in work and in love. Strives hard for the one, is useless in the other. This hero enjoys his math and the puzzles of computer programming (all this set in the late 1960s), but is strangled by the routine of the suburban office life. As a narrator Coetzee is not so tasteless as to suggest technical details, which keeps his work up in the universal.

Waiting for the Barbarians is so far the strongest Coetzee I've read, the one that changed me the most. It is abstract in its setting, placed at the edge of some empire in some unknown historical moment (the men ride horses, is about all that dates it) where go some "barbarians" of undefined race. It is easy to project the story to Coetzee's colonial South Africa, or the American West, or just about any other place on Earth, at any time, since there is always an empire and a class of barbarians. Waiting is all about that kind of meeting point.

Coetzee is a roughly moral artist. All his stories are hard confrontations with moral extremes, like horror movies without the gore that dehumanizes the monster. Routinely, his heroes take us to the moral edge; doing things without apology that convention tells us not to do.

The other characters, the antagonists, are also challenging, in haunting ways. They are frequently sympathetic despite their turpitude: Coetzee insists on bringing us to the brink with them, with seeing their needs, their thought process. I will never forget the colonel in Waiting for the Barbarians who says "But surely that is what war is: compelling someone to do something they do not wish to do." And so blithely, confidently, he says it. It is hard to disagree with him.

Disgrace is a prize-winner, but it was less effective for me. To be sure, it brought me to the brink again, but this time I didn't quite appreciate the hero's perspective on the central horror, and less so the daughter's alien calm. This story seemed more embedded in present-day South Africa, and I suspect I'm missing some context. Or was I just getting desensitized?

My latest selection was Foe, a retelling of the Robinson Crusoe story, and the story of the story, from the perspective of a woman supposed to have been with Crusoe, who brought the story to England and told it to a Mr. Foe, a fly-by-night writer who steals the tale. This one seemed to be wearing its politics too brazenly, such that I could see too far ahead. It ends with a fizzle, returning briefly to the story of the island, a nice roundelay that didn't seem to reveal anything new. I'd like to have read it with Robinson Crusoe in one hand, to see where it matches up: perhaps there's more going on than I detected. But even if Foe isn't dramatic or challenging, it is a well-functioning machine: it does what it says on the tin.

I'm captivated by Coetzee and is one of the readers for whom I'd read any book he's written. Lucky, then, there are so many more to go.