The Pickup
by Nadine Gordimer
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 271 pp., $24
She seems to write in a language that isn’t ours. It’s English, of course, at times ultra-colloquial (“whatever you do, love, whatever happens, hits you, mate, Bra, that’s all right with me”), but it’s elusive, aloof, burning with a command so fierce — syntax, dialect, style, everything — that it seems to come from somewhere else. Somewhere really good. This is Nadine Gordimer at 77: Standing alongside J.M. Coetzee as a pillar of South African literature, and hailed by many as one of our greatest living writers, period. She’s a master storyteller, a novelist and essayist of more than 25 books, an activist and Nobel Prize winner. The Pickup comes two years after Living in Hope and History, an essential collection of essays, speeches, and articles that Gordimer calls “a reflection of how I’ve looked at the century I’ve lived in.” Now it is a new century, and her 13th novel couldn’t have come at a better time.
A witty and prescient look at the world as a postmodern puzzle of desperation and dead ends, The Pickup follows the complicated relationship of Julie Summers, a trust-fund 30-year-old living in South Africa, and Ibrahim ibn Musa, a Tunisian national. A college graduate now working as a migrant mechanic, Ibrahim, aka Abdu, has evaded deportation for more than a year, but South African authorities finally track him down just as he and Julie are falling in love.
And so they flee together, back to Ibrahim’s homeland, since Julie feels that she never had a real family anyway (“You choose to go to hell in your own way,” says her father). She finds one in the ibn Musa lean-to near the Sahara. Unprepared for Islamic village life, she makes do by teaching English, all the while learning more about herself. Is she really in love with Ibrahim? Probably, but Gordimer never convinces us, wisely choosing to examine primarily the circumstances of their love. They are trapped in their own momentum, characters caught up in the author’s brilliant laws of motion.
This article appears in September 21 • 2001.