The House on Eccles Street

Menard rewrites the Quixote by arriving at the same words. Costello rewrites Ulysses by letting Molly out of the house. Both are arguments about who owns a character. Only one of them is a feminist event in 1969, which is to say a date Coetzee chose because he needed Costello to be famous for something he would not have to print.

We never get a page of The House on Eccles Street. We get the interview in which a competent woman explains the impact it had on her as a student, and Costello’s mild refusal to be grateful. That is the right amount. A quoted Molly-monologue in Costello’s voice would have been Coetzee doing Joyce, and the book is not about that. It is about a writer who cannot stop being the author of one novel, the way Casaubon cannot stop being the author of no novel.

Calvino withholds the rest of the book because the rest of the book is the point. Coetzee withholds Costello’s masterpiece because the masterpiece is a burden. She has written five novels since. Nobody introduces them.

On the readability rating. Described by interviewers, by a son, by the author of the book you are holding. Not a sentence of Molly’s new life. Joyce remains the only Eccles Street in print.