Elizabeth Costello J M Coetzee Secker & Warburg, 231pp, £14.99 ISBN 0436206161

J M Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello is a collection of essayistic short fiction masquerading as a novel. After the enormous success of Disgrace (which won the Booker Prize in 1999), much of Coetzee's recent work has been disingenuously described as fiction. Reading Coetzee at his edgiest is like having a beautifully crafted knife held to your throat. There is no more disciplined writer working today. And yet Elizabeth Costello, for which Coetzee has once again been longlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize, has neither the gravity and compulsion of Coetzee's best fiction, nor the precision and intensity of his finest critical writing.

Ever since The Master of Petersburg (1994), his menacing but never entirely enthralling novel about Dostoevsky, all Coetzee's subsequent fiction (and a good deal of his nonfiction) has been written in the third-person present. This lends his prose an undeniable urgency but with Elizabeth Costello, there is a sense that the style has become almost too comfortable for Coetzee. It is no coincidence that his two finest novels, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and Age of Iron (1990), were written in the first person.

Elizabeth Costello is an Australian novelist in her seventies; the literary events that occasion and provoke her considerable intellect bind these dogged, curious and ultimately unsatisfying stories together. Through a series of unrelated incidents, we observe the vicissitudes and quirks of a literary novelist's life. In "The Novel in Africa", Costello is invited aboard a cruise ship where she confronts a Nigerian writer whose opinions she challenges. In "The Problem of Evil", she encounters the author of a graphic book about Nazi Germany. Theodor Adorno's pronouncement that "to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric" is never mentioned, but its echoes are heard on every page of this story.

Although we never see her writing, Costello struggles through the life of a famous writer: she attends award ceremonies, suffers the anguish of interviews, and attends half a dozen lectures. These lectures form the basis of much of the book. Unfortunately, it seems that the book was written around the lectures rather than the other way round.

Costello and her creator have much in common: both reside in Australia (Coetzee emigrated from South Africa in 2002), both are vegetarians, both are atheists, both are classicists, both speak German and have considered, at one time or another, becoming professional translators. Costello's son, John, has the same first name as Coetzee, and the author's last name is embedded in that of his protagonist Elizabeth Costello. Occasionally Costello sounds like David Lurie in Disgrace defending Eros against Reason (as though they were two football teams). But most of all, she sounds like Coetzee.

Making Costello an Australian signals Coetzee's attempt to move away from being labelled, and thus confined, as a South African writer (something he has always rejected). If Elizabeth Costello was South African she would be obliged, in some sense, to explain away the implications of her South African history. It also means that Costello can approach America and Europe, where much of the book is set, from the same position as Coetzee - as a coldly observant critic who belongs to the west but is at the same time an outsider.

Costello's age allows Coetzee greater liberty; he does not have to apologise for her arguments, or offer reason when she only offers cant. He does not have to do this but he does it anyway. One of the book's great weaknesses is that each of these stories includes a character whose only purpose is to provide a counter- argument to Costello's.

The arguments about animal rights, religion and the challenge of the African writer are neither dialogue nor discourse (despite their different points of view, the voices all sound the same) but a way for Coetzee to cover his bases. It is a narrative ploy driven by a fear of criticism. In refusing to take responsibility for its position, the book loses both interest and momentum.

Most of these stories began as academic lectures and all but the last two have been published elsewhere. Most substantially, "The Lives of Animals" (which takes up a third of this book) was originally delivered at the Princeton Tanner lectures, and has been published by Princeton University Press (in the US) and by Profile (in the UK). In making the case for animal rights, it is unsuccessful as polemic, static as fiction, and unconvincing as philosophy.

I am not sure that Costello's circuitous argument in "The Lives of Animals" is, at its core, any more complicated than this two-sentence quote from Isaac Bashevis Singer: "I did not become a vegetarian for my health. I did it for the health of the chickens." Costello's argument lacks both the moral clarity of Isaac Bashevis Singer and the philosophical clarity of Peter Singer. Coetzee has written more searchingly about his vegetarianism and the culture of meat in America in his 1995 Granta essay "Meat Country".

With her background in literary criticism, Costello fares better in "The Poets and the Animals". A generous reader might suggest that the book constitutes Costello's attempt to clarify her phil- osophy. But there is either too much philosophy and not enough clarification ("The Lives of Animals") or too much clarification and not enough philosophy ("The Problem of Evil").

Elizabeth Costello is crowded with academic and literary in-jokes, and echoes of other writers (Milan Kundera, David Lodge, A S Byatt). Although Coetzee attempts to satirise current intellectual trends, this novel is ultimately uncomfortably complicit with the world of literary celebrity and the academy.

"We do not write out of plenty," Coetzee's Dostoevsky thinks. "We write out of anguish, out of lack." It is not unkind to suggest that it is precisely anguish that Elizabeth Costello lacks. She argues, time and again, for the victory of passion over reason, but it is difficult to take her seriously when her creator substitutes intellect for emotion, reason for intuition, information for truth.

Roy Robins is a writer living in South Africa

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