THE STORY OF HIMSELF.("Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II")

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. Others, like Philip Roth in "The Facts," take a mid-career opportunity to establish, amid a crowd of fictions, some baseline data. 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. J. M. Coetzee, the inventive, ...