Nuclear Family
In Nadine Gordimer's new novel, a young father's convalescence sparks family conflicts.
GET A LIFE
By Nadine Gordimer
  Nadine Gordimer (Maureen Isaacson) |
Farrar Straus Giroux. 187 pp. $21
What a pleasure -- the sort of reflective well-being that comes when sipping a very fine whiskey late at night -- to watch an artist make the first brush strokes of the portrait: a street at mid-morning, empty save for a street-sweeper moving his broom, the neighbors away at work or otherwise occupied. Then: "She was there, at the parents' driveway gate as he arrived, able to smile for him, and quickly sense the signal for them to laugh at, accept the strangely absurd situation (only temporary) that they could not hug one another. A foregone hug is less emotional than a foregone embrace. Everything is ordinary."
Actually quite unordinary. The exasperated cadence of these opening sentences signals nervous distress no less than the rapid tapping of a foot. The woman in the driveway, Lyndsay Bannerman, is greeting her son Paul, released that day from a cancer ward. Paul is, literally, radioactive from a "destructive substance" administered to arrest cancer of the thyroid. He has chosen to leave his wife and son in order to live with his parents, and everyone is fearful that the child might be harmed by his father's radioactivity. At his parents' house, he lives in a kind of quarantine, mute much of the time because of the cancer; and when his wife and child visit, they stay well out of range. As for whatever hazard Lyndsay and Adrian, Paul's father, might be exposed to -- well, there's an answer for that. "Parents are responsible for bringing into the world their progeniture whether deliberately or carelessly and theirs is an unwritten covenant that the life of the child, and by descent the child's child, is to be valued above that of the original progenitors." These are decent people.
Paul enters into a period of introspection, as does his mother. Marriage -- what draws people together and what makes them stay together -- is among the subjects ruminated upon. In short order, we discover that Lyndsay is a renowned civil rights lawyer, her husband a successful businessman. Paul is an ecologist, his wife, Benni, a rising advertising executive. These occupations are not fundamentally harmonious, and in Paul's and Benni's case, one might say they are fundamentally hostile. Benni's clients want to build tourist hotels on the very land Paul struggles passionately to keep pristine. And beyond that -- so far as plot is concerned -- I will not go, except to mention that the venue is South Africa, present day. Surprises await, and it would be wrong to hint at them.
Thus the opening moves of Nadine Gordimer's 14th novel, Get a Life . She is a most worldly writer, engaged for many years in South Africa's sulfurous politics, and those politics often find their way into her fiction. Yet her stories manage to avoid the narrative death rattle of the political novelist; they live on their own, free of propaganda. The working world is never far below the surface of Gordimer's books, existing side by side -- sometimes easily, sometimes not -- with the sexual life, all of it within the distinctive milieu of South Africa, though that nation has many aspects of a universal human condition. She is a writer of exceptional poise, writing tight, with ruffles and flourishes kept to a minimum.
Get a Life succumbs now and then to more ecological detail than seems absolutely necessary in a novel on as short a leash as this one (in the way that Ian McEwan in Saturday told me more about brain surgery than I needed to know). Maybe the curse of the short novel is that when a word is wasted, the reader tends to notice. That quibble aside, this novel begins superbly and ends wonderfully, and in between there are passages of high intelligence, not without Gordimer's signature asperity.
Here's Lyndsay recollecting a long-ago love affair: "How girlishly exciting it must have been. To be irresistibly attractive to a man: at forty-something, with a loving husband, grown children, a successful career in a male-dominated profession; moving into a new maturity of freedom. Not to be foregone; to be taken as the other chances had been, to become a civil rights lawyer, an Advocate with Chambers. Sexual freedom, oh yes. Not as an orthodox feminist, god forbid, totting up orgasms as a constitutional right, but as one who'd read Simone de Beauvoir and the time had come to remember her concept of 'contingent loves.' Sexual freedom, yes. But not only that. Freedom of something new in experience, association of this with another mind, personality, within the same shared structure of intellectual activity. Didn't have that already, the shared intellectual activity, in abundance with daily colleagues? But not in the special context of other intimacy!"
So I suppose I've given a hint after all. ·
Ward Just's new novel, "Forgetfulness," will be published in the fall.
