Survival amid South Africa's strains
Get a Life
By Nadine Gordimer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 160 pp., $20
When Paul Bannerman develops thyroid cancer at age 35 and is forced into post-operative isolation to recover, the South African ecologist and those around him question not just the point of their lives, but of life itself, as the societal constructs of law, politics, race, gender, and others prove frivolous in the face of what it means to be human.
In this forceful novel by Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, those constructs crumble under the weight of societal absurdities that become apparent only when Paul's survival is in question. The characters live differently from the way they had, now oriented about the essential -- about human wants and needs, expectations and desires, and the resulting moral and ethical sanity that enables them to face ''the existential affront" of life.
After a few weeks quarantined in his parent's home, his radiation treatment making him a risk to others, Paul returns to fighting development projects, including ironically a nuclear power plant. But he does so with a deeper sense of purpose, made evident to him by having survived cancer, but also by the way others near to him have changed because of that illness, have in a sense survived the same illness. This is a hopeful novel.
Paul's mother, Lyndsay, a civil rights attorney, atones for an affair she had years ago that strained her marriage, and crosses yet stark racial lines in South Africa to adopt Klara, an HIV-infected child. Paul's wife, Benni, an advertising executive whose firm represents developers, has a second child with Paul, affirming his recovery, her purpose, and the possibility their marriage may improve.
Paul's father, Adrian, frustrated by putting his wife's career ahead of his own, leaves Lyndsay and runs off to Norway with a younger woman, Hulde, dying there while doing the archeological work he had always desired. Lovemaking occurs with an almost primal force in the novel, cast as the ultimate expression of being human.
Apartheid's atrocities reverberate, as do South Africa's hypocrisies in its aftermath. Gordimer's enraged narrator rails on about blacks advancing through affirmative action, blacks cashing in on ecologically ruinous projects, even blacks taking on the cultural vanities of whites. Of Primrose, a black woman hired to care for Paul, the narrator notes, ''it's not only whites who dub their offspring with pretentiously inappropriate names, a queen in ancient times, a flower in the imagined gardens from which the rich conquerors came." No societal construct, past or present, fares well.
What matters is human, Gordimer suggests, philosophically more than artistically, as this provocative novel is carried more by the elegance of its ideas than the eloquence of its expression. Modernity at every level, from the individual to the collective, clings to a landscape more powerful and enduring than it chooses to admit, mired in the illusion it can manage that landscape and those living on it through the hubris of social totem rather than the humility of human nature. It cannot.
