NADINE GORDIMER PLOTS THE GROWING PAINS OF SOUTH AFRICA

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: Sunday, September 25, 1994
Page: B15
Section: BOOKS

Vera Stark, devoted activist and reluctant wife and mother, would no doubt understand this conundrum, though irony is hardly one of her long suits. A white civil rights lawyer in the first days after the transition of power in South Africa, the protagonist of Nadine Gordimer's 11th novel has spent her adult life in the fight to dismantle apartheid; with her children grown and her husband, Ben, sharing her political vision, she's now grappling with the realities of a country thrust into the chaos of rebuilding. Vera's personal life is a microcosm of this disorder. After a lifetime of social contracts with those who need her -- two marriages, a clandestine affair, a son and daughter -- she is trying to winnow out the self who made all those elaborate (and sacrificial) bargains.

Recipient of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature, Nadine Gordimer is a master explorer of such compromises; one of her talents lies in recognizing that domain where realpolitik meets the inner life. Articulate witness to the scourge of history, she's smuggled out the awful story of apartheid over the years with the urgency of a message from behind enemy lines. Outlawed and eventually canonized in her native South Africa, Gordimer has come to stand as something of an ideal -- literary truth among the shards of political and social evil. Whether the tragic realism of "The Late Bourgeois World" and ''Burger's Daughter" or the elliptical sorrow of her stories, the fiction is rife with the consequences of emotional exile -- where day-to-day political realities can translate by dusk into a bullet in the neck.

But a subject of such enormity can be tough to live up to, and Gordimer's enduring strength has been in tracing the stain of apartheid's tyranny upon the most personal realm. In "None to Accompany Me," this job falls upon the domestic lives of two couples, one white and one black, all four committed to the dream and possibility of a new South Africa. Their failures are personal, sometimes private, not so much visited upon their children as reenacted (or caricatured) by them. It is a story that was waiting to be written; as with the Reconstruction South or post-glasnost Moscow, such toppling regimes lend themselves to the human sorrow and irony of fiction. Gordimer understands this tragic specificity -- she evoked it brilliantly in "July's People" -- and here it surfaces occasionally with poignant resonance. Desperately searching for a colleague after nine black settlers have been murdered on the veld, Vera finds herself tempted to strike a child who has garbled a telephone message. Is there a more searing way to understand the blind fury of violence, particularly in the turmoil of post-apartheid South Africa?

More often, sometimes irritatingly, "None to Accompany Me" feels as though its characters are four-limbed metaphors for a political map, its coordinates the gender and ideological codes of its author's ideas. Both essential in their work, the women here -- Vera Stark and Sibongile Maqoma, who has been elected to a powerful position in the new government -- have traded traditional roles with the men: A scholar and sculptor manque, Ben Stark has given up the work he loves, while Didymus Maqoma, a former movement hero, has been ousted from power. This gender-switch is innovative at first -- imagine men being alienated from their labors, living in the shadows of the women they need too much! But it's too pat to work without some variation, and the psychic failings of these characterizations make them seem all the more agenda-laden. When Vera -- fiercely sensual and independent -- begins defending the merits of the male genitalia to her newly announced lesbian daughter, one throws up one's hands at the dialogue. What mother and daughter, no matter how liberated, ever had such stilted exchanges? Intimacy is not anatomy.

Similar awkwardnesses appear often enough in the novel to eclipse its far more important subjects: work that matters, the accidents of history, the legacies of deep estrangement. There are a few beautiful minor stories -- Oupa, the young black ex-prisoner who works with Vera, is one -- and throughout them all runs the larger theme of Vera looking for the imprint of her soul. This is where "None to Accompany Me" is radical: in its shedding of predictable (and yes, bourgeois Western) emotion and cinematic romance in favor of something larger and possibly more truthful. Oupa's estranged wife in the rural countryside; Vera's platonic and profound ("tangled in their beings") friendship with a black comrade -- these are the evidentiary traces of fiction's gift, where a novel does what mere fact cannot.

When Gordimer writes of powerlessness in the face of bureaucracy -- "the language of the other side of the desks" -- or of a black man's merciful forgiveness of squalid tyranny, she captures the subtler legacies of apartheid with unparalleled artistry. When she writes of the hallucinatory experience of stealing water to live, or of squatter camps as "the real Post-Modernism," she delivers the tragedy of recent South Africa with such passion that you know you've been given a glimpse into the heart of it. "None to Accompany Me" is stirring as social history, providing a telescopic view of contemporary South Africa more intimate and human than any newspaper headline. Its failures are literary ones, and, to my mind, they undercut the novel's power to a dismaying degree. For some, that may matter less in the scheme of things than its sheer presence as a dispatch from the front.

Still, a moment toward the end of the novel seems triumphant both as history and as fiction, each beholden to the other. Alone with her political victories and her sweet solitude, Vera is dancing, "no one to witness," in her house at night. It is as intimate a glance at this cool, formidable woman as we -- maybe anyone -- will ever see. A moment in the margins of time, someplace where poetry and shelter intersect.

They had been thinking aloud over the news that pupils at black schools were out in the streets again, this time in refusal to pay examination fees. He took up in doubt: -- I wonder why we call them children. Eighteen, nineteen, sometimes more than twenty years old, and that's part of what's gone so terribly wrong in our times. If the parents weren't too poor to keep them in school when they're small, if there had been enough schools to take them all in at the right age, as white children start their schooling, if they hadn't been chased here and there, everywhere, all over the country in removals -- if they'd really had the chance to be children like other children -- they wouldn't be young men and women treated like children now. They wouldn't be doing the things that scare people so much, the things that young men and women do when they're angry. This country got it all wrong. --

-- And we have to believe we're going to get it right.

NADINE GORDIMER

From "None to Accompany Me"