THE PICKUP

Nobel laureate Gordimer (None to Accompany Me, 1994, etc.) expands her horizons while maintaining her habitual thematic concerns in a tale of an unlikely love affair and its unexpected consequences.

Julie Summers spends her time, when not doing trivial p.r. work, at the L.A. Cafe with fellow bohemians who disdain the corrupt post-apartheid South Africa, where former revolutionaries “drive their official Mercedes right past the Brother homeless here out on the street.” They're not shocked when Julie begins an affair with an illegal immigrant who works in the garage to which her broken-down car was towed. But it is surprising when, after her lover is served with deportation papers, Julie elects to follow him to his unnamed Middle East homeland—as his wife, upon his insistence: “I cannot take a woman to my family, with us—like this.” Ibrahim ibn Musa is not quite the same man Julie knew as “Abdu,” and Gordimer depicts with characteristic unsentimentality his exasperation with the rich white girl he picked up in part because he thought she could help him remain in South Africa, but who instead becomes rather an embarrassment as she traipses into his country like a tourist. But Ibrahim does reluctantly love his wife, who herself finds comfort and community in the village he wants only to leave. While he haunts consulates looking for a nation that will accept them (if only because she is a more desirable immigrant than he), Julie slowly makes a place among his kin, becoming close to his younger sister and winning the grudging respect of his beloved mother, who rules the family despite women's socially ordained subservience, which is not airbrushed here. Gordimer does not invite easy affection for her characters, and her prose can be as dauntingly dense as it is elegant. Her passion is for the truth, and the pleasure of reading her, as always, lies in her detailed, dead-on observations of personal interactions and the social structures that shape them.

Perhaps not quite as penetrating as its immediate predecessor, The House Gun (1998), but an artist working at this high a level demands the attention of every serious reader.