Alice Hall: Disability and Modern Fiction. Faulkner, Morrison, Coetzee and the Nobel Prize for Literature

The title and subtitle of Alice Hall’s book operate in a space that is somewhere between slightly inaccurate and slightly misleading. This is not a study where ‘modern’ means either modernist or contemporary while there is nothing specific in the Nobel prize that forges any kind of connection to disability; it is rather simply the fact that the three writers in question have been the recipients of the Swedish Academy’s highest honour.

If this seems a little pedantic, it is nevertheless the case that one of the issues with which Disability and Modern Fiction has to contend is the question of coherence: why these three writers and not others? What do they have in common? How should we read the juxtaposition of one writer (Faulkner) who finished writing in the 1950s with two (Morrison and Coetzee) who are our contemporaries? Hall knows that these are real questions, and quite rightly addresses them in her introduction, pointing out – in a somewhat unsatisfying fashion – that “it is the authors themselves that invite connections between their works” (p. 15) and noting that both Morrison and Coetzee have spoken and written on Faulkner.