Dream into nightmare

Nadine Gordimer’s deeply engaging and important new novel about the new South Africa.

By MATT NESVISKY
Dream into nightmare (photo credit: RADU SIGHETI / REUTERS)
Dream into nightmare
(photo credit: RADU SIGHETI / REUTERS)
For well over half a century the South African novelist Nadine Gordimer chronicled the struggle against apartheid. In doing so she won international renown, culminating in the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991.
Three years later apartheid ended and South Africa embarked on black majority rule. Since then, the nation at the tip of the African continent has not much troubled the consciousness of many outside observers, even those for whom apartheid had long been a matter of genuine concern. What else was there to write about? Plenty, as it turns out. As Gordimer handily demonstrates in her 15th novel, No Time Like the Present, it may even be said that at the remarkable age of 88 the writer is fired up over a whole new subject, namely the struggle after The Struggle.
Gordimer’s central characters are an emblematic mixed-race married couple. Steve Reed is the son of a Jewish mother and a Christian father, Jabulile, the daughter of a black Methodist minister and educator. The pair met back when they were comrades in the African National Congress’s guerrilla war against the white regime.
He was a chemist and bomb maker, she a teacher. Together they survived a fugitive existence, deprivation, detention and exile.
Such experiences yielded unshakable bonds.
Today they are a deeply loving and trusting couple. He’s now a chemistry professor, she a lawyer. They live in a modest, racially integrated suburban neighborhood. They have two bright and lively children – living embodiments of the new South Africa.
Yet all is far from well for the Reeds and their new nation. Gordimer piles on the conflicts and concerns like so many relentless body blows. These begin with the personal and the domestic: Send the children to a mixed-race but privileged private school or to a vastly inferior but more politically correct public school? How to relate to a black nanny who happens to be Jabulile’s distant relative? How to behave at the bar mitzva of Steve’s nephew? And then the national: How to view Jacob Zuma, the president of South Africa who is widely suspected of political corruption and sexual crimes? What to do about the unemployment rate of 25 percent? The government ministers driving Mercedes, the millions living without electricity or running water? What about the starving refugees – as many as 10 million – from Zimbabwe, Somalia and elsewhere? The students who are admitted to university unprepared and who graduate unqualified? The black empowerment program that has yielded mismanagement, kickbacks, nepotism, favoritism? The rampant crime, the car-jackings, the home invasions? The AIDS epidemic that the government essentially denies? The constant labor turmoil that spells uncollected garbage, power outages, disruptions in public transportation? The bloated military budget, the arms deals and the attendant corruption? With little evidence that things will improve, the Reeds begin to wonder what kind of society they have doomed their children to inherit. Slowly a solution emerges: emigration.
But this is a heartbreaking notion.
This is, after all, a couple who gambled all and suffered for their ideals – a free, democratic, majority-ruled South Africa. Quitting the country is an admission that all they had lived for was, at least for them, for naught.
To realize a dream only to have it turn into a nightmare is soul-shattering, no matter how rationally one calculates one’s options.
We live in an age of what is probably unprecedented migrations, but there is nothing routine about forsaking one’s homeland and adopting – or attempting to adopt – another.
Gordimer details every aspect of the anticipated move with the triumphant novelistic imagination for which she has long been admired: the reaction of the couple’s children, the grudging support and understanding of the couple’s close friends and former underground comrades, the career challenges for the professor and the lawyer, and not least, the responses of the Reeds’ parents and relatives.
Especially interesting is the view of Jabulile’s father, a not especially well-realized character who nonetheless takes the attitude that since he had always encouraged his daughter to commit herself fully to selfrealization, he must now support her in this latest, albeit personally painful, endeavor. As for Steve’s family, well, yes, the South African brain drain is a fact of life. Israel? No one seriously considers that option. Australia seems the perfectly logical Promised Land.
All of this makes No Time Like the Present a compelling and unusually thought-provoking novel that I would heartily recommend but for its defiantly off-putting prose style. I hadn’t read Gordimer for a good while, but I certainly recalled nothing in her earlier work like the bizarrely idiosyncratic syntax evident in every paragraph here. Sentences run on and fold back on themselves, or are choppy and fragmented, or feature unconventional punctuation or lack thereof. Pronouns more often than not fail to signal the nouns for which they stand in.
Time after time I found myself rereading sentences, a laborious and occasionally unrewarding exercise. Examples: “What the reasons could be, and these were with them in the times of silence which keep the balance of living together in the tenderly joyous interpenetration of love-making, and the need to be a self. Whatever that identity may be, or in the process of becoming.”
Or: “Shouldn’t he be called from the garden and fruit-box wicket, he and Njabulo are teaching Wethu’s protégé to play cricket, the game popular at their school where bats are also weapons for another kind of initiation, shouldn’t their boy have a say.”
Four hundred and twenty-one pages of such stylistic quirks hardly enhance what is otherwise a deeply engaging and important novel.