The Impostor

Starred review from October 13, 2008
In this bleak and thrilling novel, the fifth from Booker Prize–nominee Galgut, the author creates an antipastoral, postapartheid noir that centers around Adam Napier, a depressed poet who retreats to a rural South African town to write. Rather than write, Adam drinks and wallows in depression. The story accelerates once he meets Canning, a former schoolmate who regards Adam as a personal hero even though Adam cannot remember him. As it turns out, Canning is a wealthy businessman with a vendetta against his dead father: he plans to transform an idyllic game preserve his father owned into a golf course. While Canning facilitates business between corrupt politicians and shady businessmen, Adam sinks deeper into a moral quagmire and continues to fail as a poet. At the heart of this tightly wound novel is a story of betrayal—within an individual, among friends and neighbors and within a society. With Adam, Galgut has created a transcendent loser, a contemporary cousin to Bellow's magnificent Tommy Wilhelm in Seize the Day
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December 1, 2008
Like much contemporary South African fiction, this novel is about post-apartheid greed and failure, but unlike Coetzees Disgrace(2000), the focus here is not on horrific crime and violence but rather on corruption in the alliance of old white money and newly powerful black politicians. When Adam Napier loses his city job to a black intern, he wants to write poetry and, with the support of his successful brother, moves into a rough cottage in the Karroo wilderness. Adam meets up with a wealthy old school friend, Canning, has a brief affair with Cannings gorgeous young black wife, Baby, and is horrified to learn of the project to convert the wild pristine land into a luxury golf course and casino. What is Babys story? And is the white guy next door an impostor? Told in plain, beautiful prose, the intricate plot of secrets and betrayal is rooted in the melancholy landscape as the dark past and present collide across generations, white and black. The revelations are haunting.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)