The reader starts to feel that something else needs to happen, that this novel needs to somehow change our understanding of the original. When that move arrives, it manages to feel both organic and just right, providing a meaningful and necessary twist on the Coetzee text ... What some readers might identify as Lacuna’s flaws are exactly what others could praise as its strengths. Generally, you’re the kind of reader who either goes in for a feminist revision or you’re not. Though I think of myself as the former, I have to admit that I started reading Lacuna feeling suspicious of its project. I worried that Snyckers would oversimplify the complex morality of the Coetzee novel. Most of all, I think I was won over yet again by that tone of literary and moral authority I mentioned above, and how easy it is to mistake one for the other. Because after reading Lacuna, it seemed to me that Coetzee’s moral vision is ultimately more blinkered than complex. Snyckers calls for an entirely different vision, one that doesn’t resort to using rape as a metaphor for anything.
... audacious ... Snyckers’s undertaking is incredibly bold; she must have braced herself for comparisons. Yet she has produced an impressive piece of fiction in a voice that is resolutely her own.
Fiction based on other fiction has an obligation to accept the premises of the earlier work. But details of Lucy’s story in Lacuna differ wildly from Coetzee’s, and not only in small details ... Most astonishing, though, are the abrupt departures that Lucy’s narrative takes from publicly known facts about Coetzee’s life ... Lucy attributes to Coetzee egregiously misogynistic statements that a neutral arbiter would find defamatory had he not attained the celebrity status she resents ... And yet, it would be premature to dismiss Lacuna as sloppy literary criticism disguised as sneering fiction ... Ultimately, the connection to Disgrace is a MacGuffin that Snyckers employs to gain the reader’s attention and then focus it elsewhere. The claim by the narrator of Lacuna that she is Lucy Lurie, abused in and by Coetzee’s novel, is merely the pretext for the creation of a text about the aftershocks of sexual violation. Frantic, rather than fan, fiction, Lacuna ends up being an account—and product—of extreme trauma, experienced by an anxious narrator whose indeterminate ordeal has rendered her delusional.
Despite the fact that Lacuna is more heavily signposted than the M25, I’m still not entirely sure what it’s trying to say. It purports to be a feminist response to Coetzee’s novel, but it muddies the waters by rewriting the story of Disgrace and its invention in several fundamental ways ... The plot twist, when it arrives, is not in itself ridiculous but the execution is, mainly because Snyckers is too caught up in her political messaging to explore the emotional implications. She seems to imagine that giving voice to a rape victim means reducing all the other characters to crude antagonists ... Her misreading centres on the false idea that the rape in Disgrace functions entirely as a convenient post-apartheid metaphor and that Lucy’s decision to keep the child is a fantasy on Coetzee’s part about a happy mixed-race South African future unencumbered by history ... Despite Snycker’s fondness for terms such as 'intersectionality' and 'white fragility', and her concern about female voices being erased, she has completely written out the character of Melanie Isaacs, the student who is coerced (and arguably, on one occasion, raped) by David Lurie.
Snyckers’ Lucy would like Synckers’ Coetzee—a figure akin to the real-life author but also understood as a fiction in his own right—to acknowledge the ways in which his appropriation of her narrative was a secondary reenactment of her trauma. Her quest for that reckoning becomes the central hinge upon which this surprising, subtle, and deeply challenging book swings ... A novel that questions the right of an author to appropriate stories as it defends the right of the character to live them.
... engaging ... Snyckers’s Lucy is a vivid narrator who coyly takes liberties with her own accounts of her search for Coetzee and her relationships with her therapist, her burgeoning love interest, and her distant father. Readers will find much to chew on in the questions Snyckers poses about storytelling, power, and agency.
