Get a Life

Starred review from September 12, 2005
The phrase "late work" is usually reserved for masters, and it is appropriate to this 14th novel from Gordimer, whose cruel meditations on mortality and commitment are enacted within two marriages a generation apart. Paul Bannerman, a 35-year-old activist ecologist who works to prevent development of the South African bush, is diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Following radiation treatment, he stays with his parents, Adrian and Lyndsay; his ad exec wife, Berenice (Benni), and toddler son, Nicholas, visit him, but must avoid contact with Paul while he's radioactive. During Paul's stay, Gordimer sounds the depths of Paul and Benni's connection (shallow but sometimes tender) and replays Adrian and Lyndsay's turbulent (but on the surface, placid) past together. Paul and Benni's professional lives are at odds (she does ads for developers); Adrian chucked a potential career as an archeologist to advance Lyndsay's as a lawyer. When Paul returns home, change comes very rapidly—and dramatically—for everyone. Gordimer's narrator is chilly, remote and omniscient, toying with the characters and taking shots at them at almost every opening, particularly the two career-women: "How girlishly
exciting it must have been," says the narrator of Lyndsay's past affair, begun at a conference. Paul's vulnerable, mortal body and everyone's life choices are relentlessly, tauntingly picked over in a manner that is spare and quick to the point of offhandedness. The result is a lacerating novel, one in which conflicted professional and domestic lives are played for all their contradictory possibility.

September 1, 2005
For more than 50 years, the groundbreaking fiction of Nobel Prize-winning Gordimer has told the human story of a changing South Africa, from the apartheid era to today. Her latest novel is rooted in her native Johannesburg, and it is that inside view of people across race and class that is most exciting here, even as the story reaches out to universal issues of conservation. Paul Bannerman is an ecologist, passionate about his work with his multiracial wilderness team, but when he develops thyroid cancer, the radiation treatment makes him a radioactive threat. Suddenly, at 35, the white conservationist is the "leper," and he must move into an isolated wing of his parents' home. He recovers, but the metaphor of the untouchable is always there, including the quiet parallel of the family's adoption of a black foundling with AIDS "born not in a manger but in a public toilet." Paul loves his wife, but he realizes that her advertising projects with both foreign and government clients in the "leisure industry" are a looming disaster. The conservation message is strong--tourism's lure of quick jobs for the poor and desperate; the danger of dams, toll roads, nuclear reactors to the wilderness and all living things. Above all, there is the intimate story of the "untouchable" in your home and in yourself.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)